Archives Courses

It was a pleasure to host was a pleasure to host Trina Felber, RN on our latest webinar, What’s Secretly Making You Sick and Sabotaging Your Beauty. Trina shared eye-opening insights about the hidden toxins in everyday skincare products—and how they can disrupt hormones, activate immune issues like MCAS, and accelerate aging. She offered practical, science-backed strategies for making the switch to truly clean beauty without overwhelm. If you missed it, I highly recommend watching the replay—your skin, hormones, and long-term health will thank you.

Special thanks to Trina for generously sharing her presentation slides here.

To learn more about Trina’s work and offerings be sure to visit:

• https://courses.trinafelber.com/
• www.cleanbeautychecklist.com

As always, for those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:02]:
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us. I’m so excited today to have our guest. Trina Felber, right?

Trina Felber [00:00:11]:
Yes, Correct.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:12]:
Okay. She is the, she’s an RN master’s level RN and she is the mother of clean beauty movement and the co founder of Still Skincare which is a women’s wellness brand focusing on hormone safe, non toxic skin care that empowers women to embrace natural beauty while achieving optimal health. And she has over 18 years of experience. She was the founder of Primal Life Organics and helps women transition to safe skin care. I have my Primal Life Organics toothbrush that I use every day that I think I bought when you were still owning the company. So there we go. Through her holistic health and beauty reset program, she guides patients to radiant youthful skin. Who doesn’t need that? Using non toxic ingredients facial fitness. That sounds very interesting. And advanced beauty tools. And as a best selling author of the Beauty’s Dirty Secret, Trina shares practical science based solutions that enhance beauty without compromising health. Sounds fantastic and you’re in the right place and I have just the right audience to listen to this message. So thank you so much for being with us today, Trina.

Trina Felber [00:01:22]:
Oh, thank you for having me. This is a topic that I feel women really want to know about and learn about, but there’s so much noise out there, no one knows what to believe and who to trust. So thank you for having me.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:01:35]:
Yes, you’re welcome. And for those of you who are joining us, I always love to hear in the chat where you’re joining us from. It is so inspiring to see where you guys are coming from. My assistant Michelle is in the chat and so if you have you want to tell us where you’re coming from, what’s your favorite topic on beauty that you want to hear about, please jump in. And if you have questions for Trina or I, please put them in the Q and A section and then we’ll get to them later. Trina does have a presentation for us and I hear it’s really long and so she’s going to go through that and we can certainly stop and chat about any of the specific details there. So we’ll get going here. Let me make sure you can share your screen. You should be able to share your screen.

Trina Felber [00:02:32]:
Yes, I should. Hi Jean, I just want to say hi to those ladies that are putting posting. Vanessa, good to see everyone from Austin, Texas. I hate what’s going on in Texas right now, so prayers to everybody there, but nice to see everyone. Thank you for having me. Here, let me see. Let me find out how to share my screen. Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:02:52]:
Hi, Nadia. Hi, Vanessa. Hello, Cecilia Marie. How exciting. It’s so cool to see women from all over the place. Are you allowed to share your screen?

Trina Felber [00:03:07]:
I’m. Yeah, hold on. I’m trying to find the right screen because it’s not coming up. So give me one second.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:03:14]:
Mary Ellen from Connecticut. Somebody with lots of flowers. Ll we don’t know where you’re from, but we’re glad you’re here.

Trina Felber [00:03:25]:
There we go. Share my screen share. Okay, perfect. Let me go back to putting this on.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:03:33]:
Yes. And then all the questions, if you could put them in the Q A, that would be fantastic because we’ll get to those a little bit later.

Trina Felber [00:03:41]:
Yeah, I’m gonna pull my questions up to or the chat just so I can see it. All right, ladies, I’m gonna get started. I or I don’t know if there’s any gentlemen in the room. Is there possibly gentlemen? I can’t see everybody.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:03:51]:
We can’t see any everybody either. If there are gentlemen. We care about you too and care products are important to us as well. You.

Trina Felber [00:04:02]:
Yeah, no, I, I just want to mention. Yeah, no, I just want to mention that this presentation and what I talk about is primarily geared towards women. Primarily because women use more products than men, but it totally relates to what men are using. So if you’re a gentleman and you’re watching this either live or the replay, it’s that this doesn’t geared, it’s not geared towards you. You’ve got lots of takeaways you can get from this as well. It’s just that women are more toxic because we use more products than, than men. So I’m going to go through this presentation pretty quickly because a lot of this is going to be stuff you’ve heard or you know from the past. And so it’s just all. I want to tie it all together with a nice little bow at the end. But really, you know, the main thing that women need to understand is we absorb over five pounds and I think that number is even chemicals every single year through our skin diet because what we feed our skin is absorbed. I’m going to go through the absorption pathway of the skin versus when you eat food through your gut, the digestive practice that we know or process that we know how it differs. But a lot of the, just like your food, a lot of the things that we’re putting on our skin, the ingredients are linked to hormone disruption, metabolic stress and long term health issues. And women are using on average, 20 products a day. And I’ll go through that list, but on average. And that can be over way over 500 chemicals we’re absorbing every single day through our skin. So it’s really important, yeah, it’s really important to understand that the skin care that you’re using could be part of the reason why you might not be feeling so well, not able to get or heal as quickly as you think you should be. The products will disrupt your microbiome, and I’ll go through through that. Throw off your hormones, slow down your metabolism, leave you feeling tired and aging faster than really what you should be. And Kelly did a great job at my intro. I just want to say who I am, you know, again, I’m Trina and I’m super glad to be here. I’ve helped over a thousand women regain their health by detoxing their personal care products and shutting the faucet off. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that. But I do have a master’s degree in anesthesia. So I have kind of been the forefront in the clean beauty space because I’ve married those two, my two areas of expertise, my nursing and my nursing background. And the, you know, how well I understand the, the pathophys of the body, but also the clean beauty space because I formulated all my own products, I’ve manufactured products, and I’ve done everything in the beauty space. I know the dirty secrets they don’t want you to know. So I’m gonna, you know, tell you some of those. But first I just want to bring a list up. And this is a very small list, but this is a list of some of the well known and often used chemicals that are found in a lot of skincare products, including the ones that are being sold to us under the guise of being clean or being organic or natural. All those buzzwords that we hear. You can find a lot of these ingredients in a lot of skincare. So the problem and triggers for anybody that has any autoimmune problems, including mast cell activation syndrome, can be that these ingredients can overstimulate. All of these synthetic ingredients can overstimulate. Hold on, I gotta get rid of this. It kind of popped up in front of my screen. Can overstimulate your immune system. And let me get rid of the chat really quick. And stimulate your first responders. And when those are triggered, your mast cells then release histamine and other inflammatory chemicals, which will contribute to symptoms that you might be feeling every single day. But not relating back to what you put on your skin this morning, or what you brushed your teeth with, or what you used in the shower. And these can be skin rashes, flushing and itching, fatigue, brain fog, GI distress, and food intolerances, anxiety, dizziness, headaches, and the list goes on and on. So this is definitely for everyone, but especially for anyone that does suffer with any autoimmune type of issues. So if you already have any of these issues or any heightened sensitivity, your body’s already in a state of defense. So any conventional skin care, or I can add any chemical based skincare, which can include natural and organic, can fuel the fire and keep your immune system on high alert. So it’s imperative to remove these toxins from your skin care if you want to get better. And it’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to help calm your immune system, to help reduce inflammation. I always say I’ve been saying this slogan or this for probably 12 years now. Your skincare is making you fat, sick and forgetful. And depending on what age bracket you’re in, it can be making you infertile or it can make you be making you menopausal as well. But fat, because these hormone disruptors, they affect the way your body stores fat or uses it for energy because it affects your thyroid gland, which will control your metabolism, makes you sick because of all the inflammatory ingredients that cause not just cancer, but other types of health issues as well. And neurotoxic, because most of these products are, contain or do contain heavy metals, including lead, mercury and aluminum. These are neurotoxins and they will disrupt the way your nervous system functions. So I’m going to go over a review of our anatomy and physiology. But the difference primarily between ingesting food and skin care. There’s a typo, skin care and the impact on your health and beauty. I’m going to go over the myths about product use and toxicity level related to skin care and why what you put on your skin impacts your energy, weight and overall health. And then simple things that you can do that can help you regain your health, protect your health, and get your glow back. So first off, I want to talk about our, our bodies and the way we ingest food. Normally, typically, we think of our diet as what we put in our mouth and goes into our digestive system. And that is true, but we do have a protective organ when we eat, you know, through our mouth, the liver. The liver is meant to cleanse the blood and to turn or convert. We call it fat soluble, which most of these Chemicals and toxins are that we eat or in skin. In skincare, they’re lipid soluble or fat soluble, and we can’t really get rid of those through our detox pathways. So the liver converts these two water soluble, so you can get rid of them through your urine, through your breath, through your sweat, through your digestive system. The problem with this is, I want you to just notice down at the bottom, and I don’t know if you can see my mouse, but where we see the blood going into the liver here you’ve got fresh blood from the heart and you’ve got blood from the intestine. So the blood from the intestines is your digestive path. So the toxins that you’re absorbing through eating are going to go directly from your gut and into your liver. We call this first pass through the liver. And first pass through the liver is meant to get rid of 60 to 80% of the toxins. This is why when you take a vitamin or a supplement or more importantly like a medication that your doctor gives you, we call this in the medical field, first pass knowing that anytime it goes through your mouth, about 60 to 80% of that medicine is going to be rendered ineffective through the liver. So you sometimes, you know, when you, when you look at your medications, if you’re taking it through your mouth versus if you’re going to put it on your skin or put it under your tongue, the dosage will be a lot higher when it’s going in your mouth because of this reason. But when you’re absorbing it through your skin, just like your skin care, I’ll show you the difference. It’s a minute amount of that because of the pathway. So the blood from the heart is really important to understand because this isn’t just a direct line from the heart where all the blood is going from the heart to the liver, this is a very small percentage of blood that is coming for the heart from the heart. So I’ll explain why that’s important in a second. But let’s look at the skin again. So this is your second gut. Your skin is your second gut. Most of us absorb about 30% of our, I don’t know if you want to call it nutrition or not nutrition, depending on what you’re using through your skin. So this is why patches and things that you put topicals work, because as it goes through your skin, you’ve got your blood vessels down here that will absorb, it will absorb into your vessels and then into your larger blood vessels, which will then feed back into the larger vessels that go back to your heart. So the things that you’re putting on your skin are getting absorbed into venous blood. So it’s oxygen poor blood. The blood has already given away most of its oxygen on its way or in the skin or wherever it goes. So this is your circulatory system. The blue blood is like your skin. This is where you would absorb things through your skin. And this is deoxygenated. So it’s on its way back to the lungs to be re oxygenated. And this is important because then you see, once it goes to your lungs, it goes from your lungs, the majority of it then goes to your heart to, to then be pumped everywhere. So it goes to your brain, goes to your digestive tract, it goes to your, your trunk and your legs, your arms, and it also goes to your liver. But as you can see, it’s unlike the blood from your digestive tract going straight to your liver. Because you can see that kind of in the middle here, the digestive tract, what you’re absorbing through your mouth, that blood is, is filtering through your liver and then that gets pumped back up to your lungs, the blood from your heart, only a small percentage goes to your, to your digestive tract and into your liver. And that’s the problem. And that’s the difference between the digestive system and absorbing things through your skin. So again, in your circulatory system, you know, your blood from your heart is pumping everywhere, so you can see all the red veins, but a very small percentage is going to your liver. Which means that these chemicals that we’re absorbing through our skin are going full force. And they’re not just going to, you know, all your organs are actually pumping up into your brain. And because so many of these chemicals are really, really tiny and so many of us have inflammatory diseases that actually cause a leaky brain barrier, the blood brain barrier. Many of these chemicals can now, including heavy metals like aluminum, get into the brain and cause symptoms, neurological symptoms that I talked about. I put this in here. Many of us are probably not at this stage of our life, but many of us have children or nieces or family members that are in the baby stage. But this doesn’t just affect us, it does affect the next generation. So I think it’s really important for women and men our age to be aware of this and to pass this information down because the babies do absorb these chemicals as well. In fact, they’ve done some studies and they do find these chemicals in newborns. And these chemicals are devastating to A nervous system that is just developing, it’s not even developed yet. So important information. So I believe it’s time that we rethink what we put on our skin because I feel beauty should never, ever, ever come at the cost of your health. So I would love it. In the chat. Are there any questions or anything, Kelly, that you want to go over?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:17:04]:
No, I think it’s really important to understand what you just expressed physiologically. So just really simply, when we eat the majority of the chemicals, toxins, medicines go straight to the liver to be metabolized. When we put stuff on our skin, the blood goes just a tiny little bit to the liver and the most of the blood is going to be pumped back to the heart and therefore everywhere else in the body. So what we put on our skin impacts the health of the rest of the body far more than eating something that’s toxic because of the way the circulatory system works.

Trina Felber [00:17:50]:
Yeah. And the other important thing to understand. So let me ask. So I can get. Everybody can start commenting if they. I want you to guess how many products you’re using every day or take a look at this list. You don’t have to type it in yet because I have another section that you can look at. I want you to go through and look at all of these products and just kind of keep a count in your head right now or write it down, how many from this page you believe that you’re using every single day or almost every day enough to make it to write it down. I’d say at least three to four days a week you’re using these types of products. Because I’ve got one more screen and then I’m going to have you type in the chat how many products you use on an average every day. But the one thing to understand is that all of these toxins in your blood, your blood, your body is designed to protect your organs that you really need like your brain, your heart. And so what happens when you have too many toxins build up in your blood is that your body has to, if it can’t get rid of it because it can’t excrete it, it’s not the right form. When you’re absorbing these, it’s not the right form. It has to go to the liver to be transformed into a water soluble, your blood becomes saturated or toxic. And so the body has a protective mechanism, not just the liver. What it does is it creates fat because fat is where it can put these things until you can get rid of it. So, so Many women I hear say, oh my gosh, I can’t lose weight. No matter what I do, I can’t lose weight. One of the reasons that women can’t lose weight is because you’re so toxic that your body, it doesn’t matter what your diet is, it doesn’t matter if you’re working out. Your body will produce fat for storage. If your blood is too concentrated with these toxins, once you detox, then you’re, then it’s the opposite. You no longer need the fat because once your body blood level drops, it will start to detox and pull these chemicals from your tissues and your fat. And then once those levels start to drop, your body will start to utilize that fat because it’s no longer needed. So it is a protective mechanism. And this is how your products can be making you fat without you even knowing it, even when you’re doing everything else right. So take a look at all these. These are products that I can, you know, everyday women are using. Body care products, dental products, nail products. I have to say, if you have nail polish on, that’s a product you’re using every single day, regardless. And if it’s artificial nails, those are even more toxic. But that counts for every single day because your skin is, you’re still absorbing those through your, your body. Hand sanitizer, toothpaste, dental products. And in the chat, I would love to see how many products women are like you’re using every day. This is a total of 50 right here. So between these two, there’s a total of, of 50 products that we could be using every single day. So I don’t know if anybody has their total number. I would love to see a couple numbers. When I’ve done my research and asked my people, you know, or done a poll, most of the time women are using close to 20 products a day. Because you do toothpaste, mouthwash, and dental floss, right? There’s three. You put any makeup products on at least 30. Nadia says 5, 9, 12. So we’ve got a variety of numbers coming in, but on average, I believe women use close to 20 products every single day. And you know, that’s your hand lotion, your body lotion, your face stuff, your hair products, all of that stuff. And we’ll, we’ll get into why this is important right now, because this is the formula that I came up with to know what your toxic level is. So products used daily times the number of chemicals per product, which is kind of the guess, but I have a good estimate, equals your toxicity Level. And what I’ve come up with, what I’ve decided done recently, is Dr. Google. If you Google, how many products do women use every day and how many chemicals are they exposed to? Dr. Google hasn’t changed his answer in decades. The answer is still 12 products a day and 168 chemicals women are exposed to. Well, I redid the math because 20 years ago, just like the food industry has changed, changed and it’s more processed, highly processed today, so is our skin care. And most products used on the market today are just like McDonald’s. So they’re the same level, they’re all processed. And we have to take into account the number of chemicals that are in the skin care. If you have a product that has the word fragrance in it, I guarantee you there’s at least 30 ingredients, chemicals in that one ingredient all the way up to about 120, maybe 130. I’ve looked at a few and they average around 50 to 70 ingredients in that one word. And these ingredients are not healthy, they are all toxic. So right there, if you have the word fragrance, you can count at a minimum 30 ingredients all the way up to 125 or 30. So I’m just.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:23:10]:
This is why we have a fragrance free policy at the Spring Center. It’s not just because people are sensitive, it’s because it’s terribly toxic for everyone.

Trina Felber [00:23:20]:
Yes. And what they’re coming out with is these safe, they’re calling them safe fragrance or safe synthetics. Safe synthetics. Anything synthetic is still going to cause a reaction in your body. It’s not, it’s not normal. And the problem with a lot of these chemicals is it’s not just that chemical, it’s that chemical mixes with another chemical, whether it’s from the same product or another product you applied. They, they mix and they make a whole new chemical. And in the breakdown of these chemicals, they’re making new chemicals. And you’re not just using one product a day, you’re mixing. So it’s a whole laboratory going on in your bathroom that no one’s aware of. So let’s just do the numbers right really quick. If you’re someone who’s using 15 products per day and we’re going to go light because I believe the average product has around 75 to 80 chemicals in it. Because you also have to take into consideration the packaging. If it’s packaged in plastic, the plastic itself has ingredients in it that will leach into the product over time, especially under heat conditions or the hot cold. So every Time it gets hot, it contracts or expands one of the two. And when it gets cold, it does the opposite. That leaching happens even faster during hot cold desperations here. But 15 times 50 chemicals per product is already 750 chemicals a woman could be absorbing every single day. You bump that number up to 20 and 75, we’re at 100, 1500 chemicals every day. And we wonder. I know some Vanessa said it’s no wonder why we get sick. Yes, exactly. It’s no wonder why so many women can’t get pregnant. Like, I don’t. It’s not astounding to me. I totally know why they’re not getting pregnant. Part of the problem is one of the ingredients in most skin care is water. And water is typically tap water in skin care. Tap water has not just heavy metals in it and waste from the environment like pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, but it also has the most common drugs that people are on. And birth control pills are one of the most primarily used or prescribed drugs in the US so women applying 20 products a day with water in every single one of them is taking a dose of birth control while she’s trying to get pregnant and wondering why she can’t get pregnant. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:57]:
And yeah, all the plastic, like you said, all the plastics from the packaging themselves, because most things are in plastic containers and plastic bottles and it’s very difficult to find things in glass and ceramic and, you know, paper. And not only that, the, the water itself has disinfection byproducts in it, which is another problem. So this is the chlorine based metabolites that are difficult to detox, that are problematic for the thyroid as well. And there’s links in the medical literature for disinfection byproducts to lead to cancer and things like that. So yeah, it’s really tricky.

Trina Felber [00:26:44]:
It’s a hamster wheel, it really is. And water, on the other hand, you know, water isn’t just, it’s not just the tap water. Water dehydrates the skin, dries your skin out, and ends up causing premature aging, especially on the face. Dehydrated skin is going to shrivel and you’re going to see your wrinkles. One, I always say one of the fastest ways to lose about five years is to stop putting water based products on your skin. Put the oil based products on your skin, your skin’s going to plump back up, you’re going to drop about at least five years. So many women are like, oh my God, I look 10 years younger. Just by doing that. So the water has two ways that it’s harmful. It’s harmful because of the ingredients or the things that are in, it’s contaminated with, that you can’t control. But it’s also going to be dehydrating to the skin. So what I always say is shut the faucet up. This is what makes the biggest difference and the biggest impact in making the switch. When you stop putting these ingredients, these that. Remember that long list of ingredients that I had? When you stop putting these on your body, your body no longer has to try and figure out where to put them because they can’t. Your liver can’t keep up. The blood doesn’t go to your liver, all the blood doesn’t go to your liver. So to protect your brain, your vital organs, it’s creating fat. So the, the fastest way instead of going through. And don’t get me wrong, detox programs are great. Most health practitioners put you on some sort of detox program to get rid of these. But if you’re not going to stop applying these and you’re going to apply 75050 chemicals to your body every day, you are in a cycle of retox where your body, no matter what kind of detox program you’re on, you’re not shutting the faucet off. The faucet is still on and it’s dripping every single day. Oops, did I just lose my share?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:30]:
Nope, you’re good.

Trina Felber [00:28:31]:
Oh. Oh my.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:32]:
I still see it.

Trina Felber [00:28:33]:
You do? Okay, hold on.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:35]:
Oh, but it’s, it’s frozen, so.

Trina Felber [00:28:39]:
Oh, how did that happen? Hold on, let me. Okay, did it come back up?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:45]:
The slide is still frozen. You want to stop sharing and start again?

Trina Felber [00:28:51]:
I tried. Let me see if I can find it on my screen. Maybe that’s my problem.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:55]:
Okay.

Trina Felber [00:28:56]:
I don’t know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:56]:
Is anybody’s mind blown? I see a few mind blowing emojis in the chat. Yeah, it’s a little mind blowing. Crazy making. Right? So I really, I really love the. That you’ve updated Dr. Google’s numbers in terms of the chemicals. Super important to realize that Candace asked, are showers safe? Well, only if you have a whole house water filter or shower filter and even. And then, you know, it’s really crazy. So when we’re talking about environmental health and we’re off the topic specifically of clean beauty products, we want clean air, we want clean water, we want clean food. And these are not things that we can compromise on anymore for these exact reasons. So, you know, everyone should be filtering their water as best as they’re able to. And shower filters are not expensive. They’re 100, $120. If you can’t afford a whole house water filter or if you rent, you know, putting in a shower filter is going to be helpful. And then, you know, you know, part of our detox studies are often Epsom salt baths. Well, we don’t have a good bath water filter at the head of the, the faucet in a bathtub. In on the marketplace right now, there really isn’t a good one. So what do you do? Right. All right, I think we’re back on. I’ll let you continue. Sorry.

Trina Felber [00:30:43]:
I don’t know what happened. That hasn’t happened to me before. I couldn’t find the screen and it completely gone. Anyway, we’re back. So what I say is when you’re still retoxing every day, and even when these skincare products are sitting on your skin every single day, it’s a slow drip of toxins into your body. Because again, when these toxins mix with other toxins, they mix with your sweat throughout the day. They’re not just being absorbed as they are, but they’re creating other toxins as well. They’re, you know, multiplying into different toxic products. So this is what I envision when you’re putting products on your body that are toxic, that have these ingredients in them that we don’t even see. See this. But if you could see the toxins that are going on your body, this is exactly what it would look like. And this is the picture that everyone needs to paint in their head when they’re looking at their skin care and going, is this really what it’s doing to me? Because throughout the day, as those toxins mix with your oils, mix with the pollution, the sun, the radiation, by the end of the day, we’re still absorbing most of these toxins, and it’s just sitting on our skin and making us super sick. So I’ve walked this journey myself. When I was in my 30s, I had brain fog, I had fatigue. This is when I was in anesthesia school. I was having irregular periods, infertility issues, skin issues. I had acne all over my face. It never went away. I used Accutane twice. And all of the things that, you know, the over the counters and the prescriptions, all of these hormonal imbalances, I had no idea why, but I was being told by my practitioners that you’re just at that age, you’re going through menopause or you’re Perimenopausal, you just have to deal with it. And I didn’t believe that. And so I made a switch. I made a change. After a miscarriage showed me, I miscarried. And my husband and I decided that we were going to clean up our environment. And it never dawned on me that my skin care was poisoning me. But that’s when I discovered the toxins in my personal care products. Once I made the switch, I never went back. And my. Not only did my skin clear up, which I was blown away, but my body healed as well. So, you know, I believe beauty and health are inseparable, and that by detoxing what we put on our skin, you can reclaim both. Because if you’re retoxing every day, you’re never going to be at optimal health. You might get better, some symptoms might get better, but you’ll. You’ll never be at optimal health. I like to talk about Joan because Joan’s one of my clients who found me. Most of my clients, you know, especially early on, find me because they want to look better, they want to clean up their skincare. They never realize that their health issues are related to what they’ve been putting on their skin. So, you know, Joan says, you know, not only does her skin look better and the dryness and the redness went, went away, but she said that she no longer has fatigue, she’s got a better energy level, and she struggled with bloating and digestive issues, and those improved as well because we don’t think about our digestive issues in relation to what we’re putting on our skin. So I’m just going to quickly breeze through these. And Kelly, if you want the slides, I can always send you the presentation, you know, afterwards if anybody wants to go back. But really, just as a quick overview, your. Whatever you’re putting on your skin, if it’s not healthy for your microbiome, it’s going to disrupt the microbiome. You’re going to get symptoms. And those symptoms can be infections, sensitivities, redness, inflammation. And it’s because of these chemicals that are destroying your good microbiome. Acne is another one to protect your skin. Microbiome on your mouth, toothpaste, mouthwashes, ingredients like fluoride and parabens, triclosan alcohol, peroxide. Peroxide destroys the good bacteria inside your mouth. All of these lead to imbalances, which lead to bad breath, cavities, gum disease, but even worse, they lead to nitric oxide. 50% of the nitric oxide. Your body makes is from the mouth, the microbiome in the mouth. You don’t have good, healthy microbiome. You will not be making 50% nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is the molecule that causes your blood vessels to go from small. It’s a vasodilator to big. It’s what we use in the medical field for when someone’s coming in with chest pain or heart attacks so we can pump more blood to the heart. So think about other areas. Your brain needs nitric oxide. If you know your, your fertile fertility, your sexual organs, not just for fertility but for other things, needs healthy blood flow. Your heart needs healthy blood flow, your liver needs everything, needs a healthy blood flow. So many of the toothpaste on the market are actually causing disease and they are making everybody sick. And the gut microbiome. So ingredients like phthalates, synthetic fragrances, preservatives that are found in all sorts of products enter the skin and can accumulate in the digestive system and harm the gut. Not only that, but your toothpaste, you do swallow a little bit. And if you are using a toothpaste that has those types of ingredients in it, you are killing off your good bacteria. They actually did a study and found that the teeny, tiny amount of toothpaste that people do swallow causes the dysbiosis or that imbalance in the good and bad. It’s like taking an antibiotic for life and expecting to be healthy. We all know when we take an antibiotic, our gut gets, you know, you end up with diarrhea and those types of symptoms because your bacteria is not good, you have to repopulate it. When you’re using a toothpaste paste or even mouthwash and you swallow a little bit of that, it’s, it’s like an antibiotic. Those, most of toothpaste are made like antibiotics. They’re antimicrobial. And if you’re using mouthwash, it’s even worse because they even say 99% of the bacteria is killed. So you’ll have conditions like bloating and gas and food sensitivities. And no one ever asked you, what are you brushing your teeth with? What are you putting on your skin? No, we’re going to treat you with pills and tests and blood work and all sorts of things. So we need to switch to microbiome friendly, clean beauty products. And so you want to look for formulations or products that have natural oils, clay and botanicals. So botanicals are plant based, but I’m going to talk about plant based ingredients that look like plant based ingredients. So olive oil should look like olive oil on the label. Many companies today are brand washing and saying that they are plant based, but they’re a McDonald’s plant based, whereas it was originally from a coconut. But it’s been so processed and in the processing, they don’t disclose this in the processing, they use all these chemicals and the end product no longer looks like anything that the original ingredient was. So it sure originated from a plant, but it’s no longer a plant based ingredient. It has been so highly processed that it’s now basically a chemical. And prioritize products that are free from synthetic chemicals and parse preservatives and water. The second area that I want to get into is just the hormonal imbalance that these can cause. And many of these ingredients, especially parabens, phthalates and synthetic fragrances will mimic, block or disrupt hormones. And it’s really important to understand that the symptoms that you’re having, regardless of where you are in your life, irregular periods, weight gain, mood swings, menopausal symptoms, brain fog, have heavy headaches, chronic fatigue, all of those things can be made worse when you’re using ingredients that have hormone disruptors in them or endocrine disruptors in them. Because these ingredients will either mimic, they sometimes block or disrupt. And sometimes your body doesn’t know what to do with these. They don’t recognize. The body doesn’t recognize what these are. But because it’s blocking or mimicking, your body could even shut off the need to make some of these hormones. Your body will be like, oh, you don’t need these because the receptors are all full. But it’s not full with the right hormones, it’s full with these blockering agents. So this is why sometimes you get these symptoms. But if you stop using these products, these symptoms might get better or go away completely. These are all of the different organs that are impacted by the endocrine disruptors, including the thyroid that I mentioned earlier. It’s related to your metabolism. The adrenals are your stress hormone. Women, ovaries, of course, this is, you know, irregular cycles, Infertility or menopausal men, the testes as well as it will lower fertility for them as well. Pituitary gland is the master of that, controls all endocrine glands. So of course that’s going to be widespread hormonal issues. And then again, the liver having all these chemicals in you, the liver can’t keep up. In fact, most of it doesn’t go to the liver anyway. And this will definitely impact the way your body is able to get rid of, rid of and handle toxins. So in the chat, does anybody use the ewg, Think Dirty or Yucca apps? I’m just curious. I know a lot of women. There’s been so much you know out there about those apps. The ewg. Ewg. All three. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. Great. Ladies, I’m here to tell you that you’re not doing yourself any favors, that you are probably still using toxic products. Ewg. Yes, I know the EWG is the popular one for most people. It’s, it’s become pretty much the bible of beauty. And the problem is they’re not disclosing hidden ingredients. And by the way, I’ve gotten in touch, I’ve tried to get in touch with, I knew some of the people way up in ewg. They want nothing to do with me because they know that I will kill their business. Because most brands now are paying the EWG to tell them to tell you that they’re okay giving them a good rating. In fact, what the EWG is now doing is when a brand has an ingredient that is not safe or not healthy, what they are doing now is saying a disclosure that you have to put. You have to open the little window, you have to know it’s there and click on it. But it will say that for this brand, this ingredient is okay, but it’s not okay in any other brands. I saw this, my jaw hit the ground. I was like, are you kidding me? They were doing this for some of the Beauty Counter. This was when Beauty Counter was Beauty Counter. But they’re doing it for all sorts of brands. But brands pay them. And if brands are paying them, you know, you, you, you’re not going to pay to have a company say that you’re toxic. So you have to realize that this is. Now, it didn’t start out this way with EWG or Think Dirty or Yucca, but this is the way it is now. So. But the problem is, is they’re not disclosing other hidden toxins, including water. EWG doesn’t care that there’s water in there. None of them do Think Dirty or Yucca don’t care that there’s water in there. And they don’t care what the packaging is and a couple other things that they’re not that they don’t care about. So what I teach my clients is you don’t need the ewg, Think Dirty or Yucca. Anyway, I give you the information. So it’s all in your brain. You don’t have to rely on anybody because trust me, you don’t want to rely on anybody or any apps out there. I haven’t found any that are up to my standard because I give you the knowledge and I teach you how to read a skincare label. I simplify it. It’s super, super easy. You don’t have to memorize a laundry list of products or chemicals. That laundry list or parabens fell. You don’t need to know what a paraben is. You don’t even have to care what a phthalate is. I teach you how simple it is to look at a product and know, yep, this is worth my time, my money, my health and my beauty. Or nope, not worth my time, my health, my beauty or my money. And it takes less than three seconds. You want to choose brands that are committed to transparency and clean ingredients, but you have to be aware of greenwashing technique tactics. This is the problem as a consumer. You can go to the About Us page and you can go, oh my gosh, they use all plant based ingredients. They don’t use these, they do this, they don’t do that. They’re part of the ewg. And it sounds like a beautiful love story, but when I look at what they’re doing and what’s in their products, I’m like, no, they’re still putting toxic ingredients in these products. So that’s really difficult for the average consumer. But I teach you how you can find these, these companies and how you know whether they’re telling you the truth. And you want to support your endocrine system of course with detoxifying routines because you know, detoxing the body, it’s going to naturally detox all the time. But stopping and shutting the faucet off is, is the like if you’re not doing that, you’re not going to feel better. So that’s the number one thing that this is, you know where I come in is helping you shut that faucet up. Metabolic stress. This is the third thing that I’m going to go over. The last thing about neurotoxicity and this is has to do with liver, the way the liver functions and it’s overburdened and the detox pathways. But and this is very similar symptoms will be very similar to all the other stuff symptoms that I went over with hormone disruption. But the things that you can understand or that are different that might show up here when you’re really toxic is body odor. So many people are like, oh my gosh, no matter What I do, I can’t get rid of body odor. And that is really a sign that you’re toxic, that your body has too many toxins. Your liver can’t keep up, it’s storing it in fat tissue and it’s trying to come out in your body pores and it’s creating just this body odor. Exhaustion is something that’s shared across. Muscle aches is another one. And that’s related to a lot of the heavy metals and things like that. But muscle aches is another one that could be. And constipation that is a little bit different from the other ones. I say control what you can control. You can’t control the air quality, you can’t control the radiation from that. You can’t control a lot of stuff. But the stuff that you can control, what you put on your body is definitely under your control. And that’s what you need to start looking at is what can I control and what can I get rid of that isn’t serving me? So neurotoxic toxicity happens from all these synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, fragrances, your blood, brain barrier becomes weak, your gut barrier becomes weak and you end up with these neurological symptoms. So the best thing to do, you have to just detox your load again, you’ve got to detox the body. But if you’re not going to detox what you’re putting on your body or in your body, then you’re not going to get better. And again, using natural detoxifiers, clay masks, clay in your bathtub, bentonite clay in your bathtub. A scoop about a cup in your bathtub is going to help pull some of these heavy metals from your skin and help pull toxins as well. Oil based cleansers will pull out impurities as well. So those are some great ingredients because toxins, you know, no matter where you are, no matter where you live, no matter what your sex is, what age you are, toxins will age you faster. We’ve all seen the people that you know, women that are say in their 70s that look like they’re in their 50s and women in their 70s that look like They’re 90. Same thing for women in their 30s. There’s some women that look like they’re still in their 20s and some women that look like they’re in their 40s. I’m 57 and I never get really guessed as being 57. I’ve been detoxing my skin and my body for, let’s see, 18, 18 years now. My daughter is going to be turning 17 and I started my whole process was when she was, when I was pregnant with her, right before I got pregnant with her. So thank you, Vanessa. Thank you. I saw your comment. I just want to show you this picture, Sharon54. And we can all look at the after picture and go, wow, yeah, she looks so much better. But what I really want you to notice is how toxic she was in the before picture. Because when we’re looking at ourselves in the mirror, we don’t see toxicity, we see age and age and toxicity level are totally different because Sharon before age 54. Look, Sharon age 54, maybe even older. Sharon after age 54 looks a lot younger than Sharon age 54. She looks a lot healthier. So when I see people and they come to me and they want to know about their skin, I don’t see just the skin, I see what toxic level they are. Because your skin tells you a story. Your skin is the largest organ. It’s the organ that you can see and it’s communicating with you all, all the time. And Sharon on the left, the before picture is screaming at her. Her skin is screaming, you’re toxic. Get rid of this stuff in your body. Shut the faucet off. You can see 30 days later. I have, you know, my protocol is take a picture before and then you can take a couple during. But take, you know, I get you on a detox program immediately. A skin detox, super easy. One product, one ingredient. You put, put wherever you want to put it, face everywhere and you’ll be surprised at what it is, but it detoxes you. And 30 days later, this is what happens. I see this all the time. And two weeks in, women are getting compliments like, oh my gosh, your skin looks so good. What are you doing? So this matters because your microbiome, remember it’s destroying everything, is your body’s first line of defense. It doesn’t matter where that microbiome is supposed to live, your skin, your mouth or your gut, if it’s not healthy, you’re not going to be healthy. Balanced hormones are essential for overall health and well being and longevity. If you’re constantly putting hormone disruptors on your body, you don’t even know what your body normally feels like. So this is getting back to who you are. Feeling normal for the first time in a really long time. And it feels really, really good. And a healthy metabolism because, you know, we all want to have good energy and weight management and vitality. And it’s near impossible to do that when you’re using products that have Hormone disruptors in them and inflammatory ingredients. So you can take action today. There are things that you can start doing that are simple, don’t cost any money. Basically, you want to start reading your ingredient labels, looking at your packaging and understanding the two things. What is it packaged in and what does the ingredients look like? And if the ingredients look like things that are chemicals, if it walks like a chemical, talks like a chemical, it is a chemical. You will recognize the plant based. The plant based usually have what we call an INCI name. And then in parentheses it’ll say olive or it’ll say coconut or it’ll say raspberry. So you’ll know what, which ones a chemical you might recognize. Like some of the other things like clays and stuff like that. And those are great. But if it looks like a chemical, it is a chemical. It doesn’t matter what the brand tells you. Trust me, this is where we have to deprogram ourselves. It doesn’t matter what the brand tells you. I never ever read the brand story, the story of what they’re selling you or what you’re actually buying. They’re selling you marketing ploys, anti aging. You’ll get rid of your wrinkles, your skin will look better. That’s what they’re selling you. What you’re buying is in the ingredient list. So that’s where that’s the difference. Replace them with clean, microbiome friendly products. And education is power. The main thing to understand is that it’s up to you as a consumer. I read Kelly, this was crazy. I was doing some research on hormone disruptors and I found a study that, you know, said yes, it talks about all the hormone disruptors and how harmful it is for especially women. But the recommendations blew me away. The recommendations were at this point, because brands, there’s no one regulating skin care companies. It is the responsibility of the customer to know what they’re using and what to not use. Because yeah, education, that was the recommendation. Women need to be educated. And I was like, yes, I, I’m here. Here it is. So that is, that is the answer. You have to educate yourself. And it’s not hard. It’s not hard at all. Here’s the problem with educating yourself online. I call this the influencer problem.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:52:16]:
It’s a huge problem in the health and wellness space.

Trina Felber [00:52:20]:
Huge. And it’s. No one’s regulating this either. And I’m not. I literally, I, I’m not picking on Irina. She’s just a great person because you know who she says she is. And she probably is consumer safety advocate, but she’s got 84,000 followers. And this was a couple months ago. I don’t know what she’s got now. I haven’t looked. But when you see a post from her and you click on her to go, oh, who is Irina? Should I care who she is? You’re going to come up with that and you’re going to go, oh, Irina. Know what she’s talking about. I’m going to buy what Irina says to buy. When I look at what Irina selling you in her best caption down there in the middle and the second one or third one that says best, those are still toxic. They’re still not good. They’re still putting toxic ingredients. Not just one, probably at a minimum 50 toxic ingredients on your skin per product. So that’s the problem. And it’s not just Irina, it’s everybody. It’s so many people out there, and nobody knows how to read a skincare label. These people aren’t formulating skincare. They don’t know the stuff that I know. So if you want, if you want to know who you can trust, then you have to go to the people that you know, know what they’re talking about. And in the beauty space, that would be me. Nobody else has the background like me and the knowledge and the experience, experience of formulating and manufacturing my own products. So I say it’s time to join the clean beauty movement. And you’re actually going to get really great results, not just with your, your health, but with your beauty. Because when you detox your body. You saw the picture earlier of Sharon. The skin just becomes beautiful. It literally becomes beautiful. So at this point, can I. Is it okay with everyone if I tell you what I do and what I have done? Kelly, is it all right if I go in?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:13]:
Sure, let’s do that. And then I definitely want to keep, keep an eye on the time because we do have about 24 questions in the. The Q A.

Trina Felber [00:54:23]:
Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:23]:
And, you know, I’d love to wrap up around 1:30 or so for everyone.

Trina Felber [00:54:29]:
So this will just take five minutes. Yeah, I’ll do this really quick. I just want to tell everybody what I did because I can’t work with individual clients. It’s just not cost effective and it’s, it’s just not easy to give you all the information. So I created an online course. It’s a. It’s just a course you take on your own at home and it teaches you everything. I know. It’s a brain dump. I use what I call my Bold Beauty method. And this is the program, it’s called the Holistic Health and Beauty Reset program. And there’s five different modules and by the way, you get seven days for free to go in there and look around. And if it’s, if it’s not for you, you get a full refund. You just email me you a full refund so there’s no risk to you at all. But there are five modules. You go at your own pace, you pay once or there’s a two payment option and you have access for the life of the program. So anything that I would add to the program, you would get access to whenever it becomes available. But the first module is all about the back end, the beauty industry. I teach you right away how to read a skincare label. I, I teach you right away. And in the second video you learn how to detox your skin. I’d say 95% of whoever’s watching you guys all have what I’m going to tell you to use already in your home. So you could literally start today and be looking and feeling so much better in two weeks from now. In the second module, you create your own glowing skin program. So you’re detoxing your skin with what I teach you to detox with. And then you get into module two and I teach you what you now want to use to clean your skin, what you want to put on your skin for moisture and all of those types of things. Treatments I offer not just a couple recommendations of brands but I, I do recommend or do give away diy simple easy recipes. Everything’s hyperlinked, all the ingredients are linked so all you have to do is click and add to cart and you can make your own products if you want to. Super easy, you don’t have to. Again, through this program I have what I call Trina’s Guide product and brand guide and you have access to that. So it’s a living document that I update all the time. So you get my recommendations. I no longer give recommendations to people. Every once in a while I’ll throw something out on, you know, Internet or I’ll do something through my email list like hey, here’s a brand that I love this product but you want my complete list, it’s through this. I no longer do this in emails and things like that because I’m constantly updating it and brands are constantly changing so you get access to that. The third module is all about makeup, clean makeup, the makeup that I recommend, new makeup brands. I’m excited. I also belong to a Group of beauty founders that are launching brands or trying to get their brands out there. And so some of them are doing some really good things with really clean makeup. And I’m excited. So you’ll learn about that as soon as they’re ready to start selling. Fourth module is all about dental care. And dental care is so important. I get you on a good dental routine dental program. I’ve actually healed thousands of cavities and healed gum disease for people. Help them get their mouth back healthy just through the dental program that I recommend. And then the fifth module is all about body care. So deodorant, sun protection I teach you about sun protection will help block chlorine absorption from the pool. Like Howie mentioned earlier, there’s a, there’s a type of product that you can buy that will help, once you put it on, block some of that chlorine absorption in the pool and, you know, different kinds of hair products and things like that. That’s all in the body program or the module. So all of those modules themselves, there’s around 20, 25 videos or lessons in, in all of those, the value is $800. But included in the program, you also get worksheets. Every module or lesson has a worksheet. So you no longer, you don’t have to take notes. There’s prompts and questions and the action items all in the, the sheets, the worksheets. You’ll get, like I mentioned, lifetime access to my curated beauty brand and product guide. And everything’s linked in there. No more guessing. You don’t even like. You’ll know how to read labels, but if you want to know for sure, you can just go to my guide and I’m updating this all the time. And then the DIY beginner recipes are included as well. You’ll also get bonus expert sessions and the invite to be a part of my clean beauty private community. If you want you, if you join my program, you get 50 off the membership and in the community is where I answer questions. This is where my members talk directly to me. I do product reviews. If you’re not sure about a product, post it in there. I do a review on it. I do product suggestions, clean living tips, and then I also have a bunch of product recipes that you can make your own products, including sunscreen and deodorants and all sorts of things. And then that’s my bold beauty cooking show. And then we also do, I also do challenges, beauty challenges every month. So this month our beauty challenge we’re doing CMOS gel. And if you take CMOS gel. It’s super easy to make. I teach you how to make it. It has a lot of nutrients and you can just add it to your smoothie every day. And. And then I have a recipe to make a CMOS face mask. So all of this together is $1300, but that’s not what you guys are going to get it for because you’re a part of Kelly’s group and tribe. So regular price is normally 3.97. That’s what I sell the program for. But today you guys can join the program, the course for just 147. And the value of just having my curated list because I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I’m not Irina, I’m Trina. You’ll get, you’ll get that list as long as it’s available. And it’s like I said, it’s a Google Doc, so it’s updaters of Google Sheet. So when I update it, it’s automatically updated for everybody. So you can continue doing the things that you’re doing. We all know that the sooner that you start to make a change, the sooner change happens. I’m going to skip over some of these. The risk of not doing anything is the laundry list of the check mark that you will be checking off at your doctor’s office. All of these symptoms can be exacerbated or caused by the ingredients in skin care because you’re absorbing it all. It’s your second gut and if you don’t shut the faucet, I off. This is what we have looked to look forward to. The last thing I’m going to mention really quick is Rebecca. Rebecca’s a nurse. She’s one of my clients. And Rebecca emailed me three weeks into the program and I had no idea any of this about Rebecca. She signed up for the program, started the program, did everything I said to do, and three weeks later she sends me this email and I’m like, oh, my gosh. So she’s got narcolepsy, autoimmune disease, a couple other problems, and she was three weeks in and already going down on her medications and blown away by the fact that she didn’t realize, as a nurse, didn’t realize how what she was putting on her skin was impacting her health so drastically that she was actually able to go down on her meds very quickly just by making, making the switch. So I want that for everyone. These are just two other ladies. Again, I look at the toxicity, I don’t necessarily look at the beauty I look at the difference in the skin. Yeah, I know, right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:19]:
Lisa, 33 year old. Holy crap.

Trina Felber [01:02:22]:
I know, I know. You can see the difference at any age. You can. And, and Lisa was like, I’m not doing this for the beauty. I just want to feel better. She was refusing to take before pictures. I said, please just for me, take before because you’re actually going to be surprised. And you can see that like the wrinkles, she’s like, oh my gosh, I’m a new woman. Both of these ladies and you know, these women age 33, you. This is toxic. This is infertility. This is, you’re looking at the face of infertility right there because of how toxic our products are. So anyway, that’s what I’ve got for you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:56]:
Wow, that was fantastic. Okay, let’s get to questions because I know we’ve got some juicy ones in here. Ready?

Trina Felber [01:03:05]:
I’m ready.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:06]:
Okay. I keep hearing about women putting estrogen type products on their face for healthier, younger looking skin. It seems amazing. But does this, is this safe?

Trina Felber [01:03:17]:
Great question. I had someone ask me that in my community when I did my live Q A session last week. My answer is after I’ve looked at a couple of of these creams. So you’re putting these creams on for a reason. Your doctors prescribe them. That’s one thing. I don’t get into that whole thing, but when you’re going to use it as a beauty product, I feel like I have to speak up and say that the, the other ingredients that are in there, including the water and the preservatives and the emulsifiers, are so toxic that you’re not going to really notice a difference in your skin. It’s probably going to do the opposite and cause aging, premature aging or aging of the skin because of the other ingredients. So no, I don’t recommend them. I do know that there are some companies that sell the wild yam which has, you know, wild yam has the natural in it. So those as long as they’re formulated correctly would be okay. But a typical.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:04:15]:
Yeah. And they’re typically progesterone. So while DM is supposed to be progesterone and the healthcare products that are usually compounded, they’re estrogen or estradiol based. And the other thing too, based on what you’ve shared with us, is that, well, the reason that you are feeling like you need the estrogen based products is because your skincare line is probably toxic. Right?

Trina Felber [01:04:42]:
Yeah. I would say that the best thing is do is to get rid of the toxic skin care. And let’s see, do you really need that? I mean, you know, I mean, let me just get really quick, tell you all my story of my, my menopause. I call it my day of menopause because I had detox. I shut the faucet off to all those toxins when I was turning 40 and I had my first daughter when I was 40 and then I ended up having twins after years of infertility. I had twins, I switched my skin. I didn’t do anything, we didn’t really do a whole lot of other stuff. But I had twins when I was 41 and when I went through menopause at the age of 50 because I didn’t have, I wasn’t absorbing these hormone disruptors. I didn’t have any symptoms. I never had any hormonal symptoms. No weight gain, no hot flashes, no night sweats, nothing. So it can impact. I’m not saying that’s going to be everybody’s story. I’m just saying that was, was my story. I eat healthy as well, but it’s, you know, that’s how impactful it can be. So shut the faucet off and see what you really, what your body really needs. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:05:50]:
So the anonymous attendee asked about chemical and toxin free hair coloring. Do you have any tips that you’re willing to share with the listeners?

Trina Felber [01:06:01]:
There is one brand and I don’t remember the name of the brand because I looked at, I look at so many companies over the course of time and I know that there is one brand that is in my recommendation thing, my brand guide for hair products and hair color and they do service salons and they are not perfect. So hair. There are, and I disclose all of this in my program. There are certain items that you will use that are never going to be perfect because that’s just the nature of what we’re using. Hair color, like there’s henna, but a lot of women don’t want to use henna because it’s just not, doesn’t last long. It’s harder to use that kind of thing. But if you’re looking for something that works that is going to be like the safest out there, there is one option that I did find and I think they make home uses and they also do, do have salons that use it as well and they do list the salons and, and there actually is a lot of salons across the US because at first I was like, oh, there’s going to be like three salons no, they have a bunch of salons across the US that do do the hair color. So I do offer that in the, in the brand guide.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:14]:
Great. One of Candice said she uses all nutrient and wondering if that’s good by your standards.

Trina Felber [01:07:22]:
That.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:22]:
That was. That rings a bell at all?

Trina Felber [01:07:25]:
It does not ring a bell. If you want me to pull it up, I don’t know if we have time. Why I can pull it up and do a quick review of it, but it doesn’t ring a bell to me.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:34]:
Okay. All right, let’s move on since we have 36 questions. Okay. Does the word kinetics refer to the pathways of action in the body?

Trina Felber [01:07:48]:
Kinetics?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:49]:
It’s more like how things are broken down, how quickly they’re broken down. I mean, that would be how I would use it.

Trina Felber [01:07:57]:
Yeah, I would say exactly like your, your detox pathways and you know, everything is broken down to something else. And that, that’s. I would agree. It would be your. The way everything is broken down in the body.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:12]:
Right. So the enzymes that do the metabolism can vary from person to person and that might impact the kinetics. And then the products themselves will have their own kind of kinetic breakdown. So.

Trina Felber [01:08:27]:
Yeah. And don’t forget if you have autoimmune or any health issues, your liver, which is your detox organ, your enzymes might not be. You might not be making them or they might not be as functional. If you will will at certain points then. And you can change that. But you have to obviously make some changes in what you’re using or what you’re doing and eating and things like that. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:52]:
Can you give examples of how women’s existing hormone ratios and challenging patterns with menses? I’m finding this a little confusing. In what ways symptoms would likely spring up differently based on pre existing suboptimal ratios and menstrual challenges.

Trina Felber [01:09:12]:
I’m not sure if. I mean, I’ll try to answer that the best I can. What I can tell you is, and there’s tons of research and literature out there that the hormone disruptors are. They’re. They’re either making your body think that it’s the hormone and it’s either turning it on when you don’t don’t need it, or it’s blocking it when you do need it. So the symptoms that you’re getting or the levels that you might be having are erratic. And the only way to know what you’re really dealing with, if you will like, you know, is to not be using all these hormone disruptors. That’s the best way I can say it like, it’s like taking birth control pills every day and wondering why you’re not getting pregnant is the best way I can tell you. It’s blocking your body’s ability to do something that you want it to do and then going to the doctor and him saying, no, stay on the birth control. Now we’re going to do ivf, we’re going to give you all these hormones, but stay on the birth control. So this is what hormone disruptors do to your body. It’s shutting off what your body’s supposed to be doing while everything else that you’re trying to do is trying to turn it back on. And your body’s like, I don’t know what to do. It’s so confused.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:34]:
Yes, definitely confused. And you know, one way to think about it is the birth control pills are shutting down everything. But with hormone disrupting chemicals, it may be upregulating the estrogen, down regulating progesterone or vice versa, or you know, supporting testosterone and then how you’re metabolizing those things. So yeah, no wonder our bodies are confused because it’s getting so many different messages and so many mixed messages. Okay, can you talk about genes like MTHFR and how would that impact these products being broken down, excreted, etc.

Trina Felber [01:11:16]:
I mean it’s the same thing. It’s going to disrupt or block or mimic everything that your body’s doing. So especially if you have some sort of issue like that, you’re that, that’s just more reason to not use products like that. You don’t know how sick they’re making. You just like Rebecca, my one client, that’s the nurse, you don’t know what these chemicals are doing, how much you’re absorbing or how many. You’re absorbing everything every single day. So the best thing that you can do is to shut the faucet off, see where you land.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:53]:
And you know, the methylation detoxification pathways are not the primary pathways that we’re talking about really. The liver methylation is a phase two detoxification. Most of these chemicals need to be gone through first. The first phase of, of detoxification first. And I suspect that many of them are not methylation related. That could be glucuronidation, it could be amino acid regulation, acetylation, sulfation, glucuronidation. There’s a lot of different pathways that the liver uses in its second phase of detoxification that is going to impact how your metabolic metabolizing these things where would you start with a young girl just entering the area of wanting to teach her to take care of her skin.

Trina Felber [01:12:48]:
Well, you can share my course with her. That’s a good start. I don’t have one for teens that’s on my radar. My daughter is 16, so I totally get it. But awareness and start talking about it. And they do what you do a lot of times not at that age as much or, you know, at that age, they’re starting to resist what you do. But I, I do know that if I stay true to what I’m using and I’m saying, and I’m doing that when they come back around, you know, in their 20s, it will make more sense. But that being said, I have bargained with my daughter, you know, on certain things. Like you can’t use that nail polish, but you can use this one. So that’s not a choice. But these here are your choices. So I don’t take the choice away. I try to give the better options. Sephora is not the place to go for these. I know that’s where all these teens want to go get their stuff. Because it’s fun to go in there, but just walking in there is basically. It’s so bad. Yeah, just the fragrance alone is really bad.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:14:01]:
It is. Okay. Are there no shower filters out there that operate with distillation or reverse osmosis? Any maker models that you can name, please, that maximally filter out as much for shower heads or bathtubs that matter.

Trina Felber [01:14:16]:
You know, I use, I use Aquasana brand now. I have the whole house water filtration system. But they do have, and I was just offering this to my community as well, but they do have the. I think they have one for the sink and then they have one for the shower. So. And what I do suggest is if, if you can only do the shower, not like a whole house, then I would actually use that. Keep the shower head as clean as you can. But I would use that to get my water to brush my teeth with as well.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:14:47]:
Right. Yeah. The other company that I like a lot is called Pure Effects and they have both a whole house water filtration system as well as individual under the counter shower filters, things like that. And then there’s always zero water. I love Zero water. It’s inexpensive. They used to have a glass container I have looked at recently and I haven’t been able to find it, which is super depressing because then you’re. You’re just filtering it into plastic and it’s sitting in plastic. But, but you know, you do the.

Trina Felber [01:15:18]:
Best that you can borrow. B I think it’s B O R O U X is a good one. It’s similar to the. It’s basically the Berkey but better when the Berkey went out of business. But baroque B O R. If you Google Berkey, new Berkey or something, it’ll probably come up. It’s like B O R O U X or something like that. That’s a really good one for counters for the counter.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:45]:
So Nadia asked, I mean this is probably before we talked about it, but don’t you think that using EWG Yucca and and credo and some of these things are better than nothing at all?

Trina Felber [01:16:00]:
I mean it’s like a loaded gun. You’ve got one bullet in the chamber. Are you willing to take that risk? I know. My answer is no because I know how easy it is to avoid everything. Everything. I know that you don’t have to memorize a laundry list. You don’t. I know how easy it is. No. The EWG think 30 and yucca. I don’t think they’re better than anything for maybe some things, maybe cleaning supplies is what you’re putting directly on your body that’s going to directly impact your health. No, I don’t let my clients, they don’t need to and they don’t want to. And I would, I would and I have said that on social media that don’t trust the ewg, think dirty or Yucca. I don’t trust them.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:48]:
Great. Okay. What is the best strategy for those of us who are swimmers and must use chlorinated pools?

Trina Felber [01:16:56]:
Yeah. I have a swimmer that was in, in my group so using what I recommend is a balm that like a moisturizer balm that has like a beeswax or tallow is the best thing to put on your skin as much of the surface area of the skin that you can because that is going to block as not all of it, but block some of the absorption of chlorine.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:17:25]:
And then do you have an opinion about chlorinated pools versus like saltwater pools and.

Trina Felber [01:17:31]:
Oh, definitely. Yeah. Go for the salt water 100%.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:17:34]:
Yeah. Those still be some chemicals but it will be better than. Than a chlorinated full on chlorinated pool. Yeah, yeah. When it comes to oil or water based products, does the same apply to lubricants?

Trina Felber [01:17:50]:
So okay, lubricants which would be polysexual or for women like vaginal. There are some oil based like I know olive oil is really good but obviously if it’s for sexual, you don’t want that because of, you know, for reasons. But so I get, I mean it all depends on what the product is being used for. I guess nine, I would say probably 90% of the, the types of products that are out there, maybe even more. There’s a, a better option than a water based option. But there are some, you know that obviously some ingredients or some things that you’re using them with need a water base. They would break down in oil or whatever. So. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:18:41]:
Let’S see. I have anonymous. I’m sorry, I have unexplained neuropathic pain, random traveling zings and zaps all over. My mercury level on a hair and a mineral test was the highest my provider had ever seen. The toxic load on De Nova Nutra eval was a 9 out of 10. I wonder if it’s related to all of my beauty products. They thought it was mcas. But my problem seems unrelated to food intake. And chromolyne made no difference.

Trina Felber [01:19:07]:
I mean, yeah, your beauty products could probably is if it’s not the reason it’s a contributing factor. And your body is probably just overwhelmed with like we’re talking about with toxic level that your body’s not getting rid of it the way it should. I would probably, I mean, of course I can’t offer treatment. So I just want to be fully clear on that. None of this is offering treatment. It’s all just suggestion or education. But I believe clay is a really great product or ingredient to use like bentonite clay. And like I mentioned earlier, I would just put a cup of that in a bathtub, soak for 20 minutes a couple times a week or as often as you can and see if you can’t get those levels to come down. I’ve done my levels and there is people out there claiming that clay, or especially bentonite clay causes lead toxicity. And I can, I can tell you that’s not true and you have to kind of do the research on your own. But I’ve in the past, I haven’t done it in a little while because I don’t have a reason to necessarily do it. I’ve ingested clay, but it has to be food grade. So I used to do bentonite food grade clay, tablespoon and a glass of water once a night for three days. So I would do it the first, second and third of every month. That was my routine. And I brush my teeth with clay based toothpaste and I use clay in a lot of things. And if it were true that you absorbed clay or lead from clay. I should be dead because I’ve been doing this for 20 years. But my lead levels, I’ve had my analysis done at least 3 or 4 times over the year. I’m 0.0002 like it’s non existent. I have no lead in my body. So I would suggest using a food grade and I even suggest food grade clay. Anyway, even if you’re doing a bath and any other kind of detox that you want to do, if you want to do an ingestion, I mean. Sorry, I hurt. The nice thing about clay is once it binds to lead or any mercury or anything it holds onto it, it’s an ionic bond. So it’s not going to let go of it until it exits your body. And of course if you’re ingesting it, it’s going to come out the other end. But in a bathtub, same thing when you’re putting it on your skin, your gum tissue, when you’re brushing your teeth, it’s cleansing the tissue of all those toxins and it doesn’t let go. So that’s one of the things that I love about clay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:54]:
Great, that’s super helpful. The other thing I would say is you need to find the source of the mercury. I mean that too. If you’re eating fish, it’s coming from your diet. If you have amalgams, if you have metal in your mouth, oftentimes that’s another significant source. The other source could be be potentially tattoos depending upon what the base of the ink is and if the Genova Nutra eval is a blood test. So I’m less concerned about the hair test. I really want to know what your whole blood mercury level is. If your level is over 5, that is greater than 95th percentile of the American American population based on CDC and Hanes data. And the people who have the highest mercury levels most often are fish eaters. So if you are a vegetarian, except you’re a pescatarian, that could be a huge problem. The other issue may be in terms of exposures. If there have been flight fluorescent light bulbs that have broken, there is mercury in the bulb itself and that’s actually a hazard because it becomes aerosolized and then you can get mercury exposures. Very high levels of mercury exposures. Other things to think about, crematoriums, if you live near a mortuary or a crematorium, a lot of people who have dental amalgams, when they light them on, on fire, all that mercury goes up into the atmosphere. So if you happen to live near there, that could be a potential problem. And then there’s mercury exposures in high fructose corn syrup. If you drink a lot of diet soda with high fructose corn syrup in it or other fast food products that have high cor. High fructose corn syrup in them, there’s mercury contamination there. So do your due diligence. Make sure that you get a whole blood mercury level and take it to your doctor. And good luck with that one. That’s really tough. I’m sorry. Okay. Hydroxy appetite. And we have only a few minutes left. Does that cause harm? And then xylitol hyd.

Trina Felber [01:24:21]:
Hydroxyapatite. So in my theory, you don’t really need hydroxyapatite if you’re using the right product. Unfortunately, most of the products on the market are not formulated correctly. Nano hydroxyapatite. There’s new information coming out. I used to use it. That’s what’s in Primal Life. I’m no longer. I saw Kathy asked a question. I’m no longer the owner of Primal Life. I sold it a year and a half ago. I was supposed to stay with the company for four years. They got rid of me after four months. So now I no longer have my hand on the ingredients or, you know, any of that stuff. So I don’t know what to say about, you know, their products anymore because I’m no longer. Unfortunately, it’s a really sad situation, but I’m no longer able to verify their. Their products. However, nano hydroxy appetite. There is some literature coming out now. My choice right now is to avoid it after I’ve researched more about it because there is some research that shows because it’s nano, anything nano can cross through into the bloodstream and it can cause DNA damage. So I’m avoiding nano hydroxyapatite. Micro hydroxy appetite. There’s. It doesn’t work as well because the idea behind nano is that it’s so tiny it will get in and plug the holes in the teeth. The enamel micro is larger and so it’s not going to plug all of the small tiny holes. And in fact, it might not plug many at all. But it is safer because it’s not going to cross through the bloodstream. So it will be effective. It just won’t be as effective. So it’s kind of like this really sucks. It’s not a good answer. I like clay. I use clay because clay has all the minerals that you’re taking, teeth need. And it’s not going to be damaging to you or your teeth or your body. So I have a recipe that’s one of the recipes I offer. Tooth powder, by the way, takes less than five minutes to make. And you can make a batch that would last you for two years. It’s going to cost you a fraction of the amount of money that it would cost you to buy it. So I prefer. Because when you make your own products, especially a product like that, you can try the ingredients. If you don’t want to put something in it, you don’t put it in it. So for a product like that, because it’s so easy to make, I prefer making it myself. And that’s what I do. Because honestly, there’s not one single toothpaste or tooth powder on the market right now that checks all my boxes of being safe and good and remineralizing and safe to the bacteria.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:27:03]:
And xylitol, I think I miss that.

Trina Felber [01:27:06]:
Xylitol is an interesting one. So the research out there is that it supports the microbiome of the mouth. Because I’m a formulator and I know and I was going to use xylitol in some of my products. I know how much xylitol has to go in there in order for it to be sweet. So it kind of overwhelms the recipe. So xylitol, like you’re brushing with xylitol, I mean if you really want a sweet, a sweetener monk fruit, but it has to be like legitimate monk fruit. It can’t be mixed with erythritol or something else. A straight monk fruit is the best sweetener. Xylitol, while it’s not gonna hurt, it’s definitely not gonna help in the way that it’s remineralizing because it, it cuts down on all the good ingredients that you need. So most people, when I, you know, when in fact, for Primal Life, when I was the CEO and the founder, you know, I’m still the founder, but the CEO, Our best selling tooth powder was a non sweetened one. It like people actually loved the non sweet. So interesting.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:17]:
My plastic surgeon had me use Vaseline after procedure. Is it toxic?

Trina Felber [01:28:21]:
Like. Oh, it’s petroleum. Yes. Don’t use Vaseline.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:26]:
Yeah.

Trina Felber [01:28:27]:
Somebody better options.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:29]:
Somebody else asked about Aquaphor.

Trina Felber [01:28:32]:
Not good. Yeah, yeah. I can, I can pretty much guarantee that if it’s mainstream and you see it and you can buy it off of most grocery stores, not, I’m talking main grocery stores, not even just a health food store, just a regular grocery store. Not Good. Okay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:49]:
I’m just. Very quickly, how about this one? Why as we age, our pores get so big. Any way to stop this?

Trina Felber [01:29:00]:
Honestly, I find that when you start using the right products, most women, their pores go back to like they, they just go, they shrink. Like I don’t have many of my clients. I don’t really ever get a question about pores, pores from women. Because believe it or not, when you’re using water based products, you’re drying your skin out so much that your body, it has it, it compensates in two ways. It either overproduces oil, which is what I was doing before I switched. My skin was so dry and it was acne, but I was oily. Like I didn’t know my skin was really dry, it was oily. So I thought I had oily skin. So I do more to dry it out. But because you’re drying your skin out, your body’s actually overproducing sebum. The other thing that happens is that or it becomes dry and you just have like really dry skin. So that’s how your body compensates to water based products. So when you swap it out for something that’s oil based, your skin is kind of like, oh, I don’t have to do that anymore. Because it’s not necessarily like your skin, skin is living. It’s reacting or trying to solve the problem that you’re giving it. So if you don’t give it a problem, it’s just going to kind of go away and be normal. That’s what I found.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:30:19]:
Right. I. There are so many more great questions. I think maybe what I’ll have Michelle do is grab the questions and we’ll see if we can get a few additional answers in the replay. But I think that for everyone’s sake, we’ll wrap it up. Trina, this has been amazing and I’m sure that people listening learned a ton and are hopefully very enthusiastic about cleaning up their personal care products and their beauty products and really seeing what they can do. I know. I am excited to go through your course and figure out, okay, what do I gotta, what do I gotta do to change this up? And Michelle put the link to Trina’s course in the chat and then somebody wants more, a few more questions to be answered.

Trina Felber [01:31:17]:
Okay, I have time if you have time. I’m good.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:31:19]:
Okay, I got a few minutes. But yeah, we’ll, we’ll cut it in 10.

Trina Felber [01:31:23]:
We’ll do five to.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:31:24]:
We’ll do. Okay, we’ll do a few more minutes. If you want to.

Trina Felber [01:31:28]:
And the link is in there? Yeah, the link is in there for the course if anybody’s looking for signing up.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:31:33]:
So yeah, yeah, so the link is in there. It’ll be in the replay notes as well next week. So how about this? I’ll look through, I’ll ask you a couple questions you look through in case you see something that you really want to answer. How about this? Are facial lasers for anti aging and micro needling. Okay, Are they necessary?

Trina Felber [01:31:53]:
So lasers are, you know, typically okay. It’s what they put on after them when you go for a treatment. That sucks. Because what happens with micro needling and lasering is that it opens up your skin so that it kind of absorbs more of what you put on it next. And unfortunately, salons, even really high quality natural salons are not using quality stuff. I don’t go get any. I have literally never gone and had a facial or anything like that. If I did, I would do the same thing I do when I go to get my hair cut or I go to get a massage is I just take the products I want them to put on me. So that is my biggest suggestion is if you’re going to have that, any type of treatment like that, micro needling. I actually have a microneedling in class. It’s part of the course that you can do your own micro needling at home, dermaplaning and things like that. You can do some of that at home and see what kind of results you get. But if you do go, that’s my suggestion. Take, take the product you want them to put on because what they’re putting on is probably not good.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:33:01]:
Yeah, that’s really great advice. It’s like when you go to the restaurant, you need to eat gluten free. You just tell them at the restaurant you need to eat gluten, gluten free. And for some people that may mean you have to bring your own food with you. Whatever. Why don’t we do that at beauty salons? I hate the shampoo and conditioners that they use. They’re so full of crap and they smell awful. So you just have to be bold, right? And bring your own products and say, you know what, this is really important to me. Can I use aloe vera juice? Juice as a facial mist toner.

Trina Felber [01:33:38]:
Aloe vera juice. Okay, so what I can tell you about aloe and I’ve done plenty of research trying to find because I use, I like to use aloe and recipes. Most aloe is going to have preservatives in it. Citric acid is one of the preservatives used. Most companies are using a citric acid that’s produced from mold. So I don’t recommend any longer that any of my clients use aloe or any aloe products that are bought unless they verified with the company that they’re using citric acid from lemons or limes. And I think you can actually make it from. Might be sugar. There was some other ingredient that you can beats. Maybe it was beets. But I suggest that you get an aloe plant. If you really want to use aloe, just cut the stem and use the aloe. Aloe like you can use it for. I do micro current and you can use it for microcurrent. But I just. Now cut the stem. You don’t need a lot. Rub it on your face and use it that way. That’s mine.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:34:39]:
That’s a great idea. Love that. Can you find a. Find all natural makeup artists for weddings, Our own wedding hairstylists that prioritize these things. Is there a list of directory? I mean, I think it’s probably what you just answered, but yeah, I mean.

Trina Felber [01:34:59]:
You’Re gonna have to probably bring your own and make sure ahead of time that they will use your products. You know, this is the only other thing that I’m gonna say because I’m not the type of person that says, oh, my God, you can never, ever, ever do that again. You have to pick your poison. So that’s probably one of my favorite sayings things, especially through the course. You have to pick your poison. And if you’re healthy, the poison’s not going to kill you. Like, if you go to the bathroom and wash your hands with the nasty soap, that’s not going to kill you. As long as you’re healthy, it’s not going to throw you over the edge. So once you’re healthy, if you want. If you’re getting married and that’s your special day and you really want to have a professional makeup and, you know, all of that, go for it. It’s not going to kill you, you know, and enjoy your day. If you want them to use your products because you know they’re healthy, that’s even better. But I believe that as long as you lower your toxic burden to where your body can handle it, those days where you’re like, I’m just going to do it, you’re going to be fine. Right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:03]:
Yeah, I agree. Okay, big questions. Let’s talk about Botox and fillers.

Trina Felber [01:36:09]:
Oh, we didn’t go There. Yes. Let’s go.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:13]:
Thank you anonymous attendee, for your brilliant question.

Trina Felber [01:36:18]:
Is there a specific question or am I just going out?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:20]:
So let’s see. Can you share your thoughts on term and Botox in term and fillers in terms of toxicity with one time injections, you know, quarterly half a year injections, is there actually toxicity? What bad things can happen and how long likely are those events for these famous cosmetic products?

Trina Felber [01:36:41]:
Yeah, let me put it this way. I’m just going to answer this with one side effect that they never tell you about. Botox. Fillers is a whole another thing. Filler sits in your skin and your body and it’s inflammatory. Like if you’re talking like it’s inflammatory to the person that doesn’t have autoimmune or any health issues because it’s literally something that’s in your body that’s not supposed to be there and your body doesn’t recognize it. So all of those inflammatory things are going to start happening and it doesn’t go away, it stays and continues. So it’s a low grade inflammatory process that you are always, your body is always having happen internally. So fillers, Botox, I’ll just, let me just go to the one side effect that no one’s talking about and then you can make the decision whether it’s worth it. And mind you, there are a way more like I don’t recommend Botox, even single injections, but Botox is a neuro, it’s, it, it’s a paralytic, it paralyzes the muscle. And if it paralyzes a muscle, you have to understand that your muscles are a family. So when there’s a family, you know, it kind of all of the family. It’s like when something happens in your family, it doesn’t just affect what one person, the entire family might not affect it as much as that one person, but the entire family does get affected. So say, you know, your daughter’s 18, breaks up with her boyfriend, she’s devastated, of course she’s devastated. And then the rest of the family has to deal with the other things that happen along those lines. Your muscle group is a family. When you’re injecting Botox, it paralyzes this muscle. There is a very important muscle in your body that you don’t want to paralyze and that would be your heart. Your heart is a muscle. There are reports or statistics that show that arrhythmias, and that’s an irregular heartbeat or rhythm happen to women that have had Botox. It can start after that, but the connection is never made. So you, you know, the Botox will wear off. So Botox does get broken down by the body. It doesn’t like it. It’s broken down. It can also migrate. It likes fatty tissue. And the closest fatty tissue is your brain. So there has also been a connection with early onset of Alzheimer’s, but it gets broken down over time. So usually every three months you have to go get re injected. So by the time you’re starting to feel better and maybe you’re not getting those palpitations anymore or whatever’s going on, maybe it’s even just walking and getting muscle cramps and things like that starts to go away, but you’re never correlating. And then all of a sudden you get your Botox injection again. And then a week later you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m doing these things again, trying to correlate it with something, but have no idea. It’s because they don’t tell you that with Botox. Wow.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:39:40]:
Yeah. Okay, how about red, those red light therapy masks or red light therapies.

Trina Felber [01:39:47]:
I love red light. So yeah, I have, I have a couple. I’ve tested a bunch of them. I do have red light. I love the red light therapy. It increases blood flow. It’s something that you can do that’s not going to damage. It’s very healing, not just for the skin, but if you get a cut or something, even a surgical wound, they’re really good for any kind of wound. So yes, I love red light.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:40:09]:
And do you do the mask thing you look like.

Trina Felber [01:40:12]:
Looks like I actually have one here. I’m traveling. I’m in Scottsdale for about three months. So I brought my red mask with me. But mine is the, it’s by cure, Q U R E and it’s, it’s the full mask. And I, and I love it. And that one, the reason I love that one because it’s three minutes. I don’t like, I’m busy and sitting for you know why? Unless I’m meditating and, and sometimes I’ll put it on when I’m meditating. But it’s a three minute treatment. So you can pop it on in three minutes, you’re done. Some of them, most of them are like 20 minutes, but that one’s a three minute.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:40:42]:
Yeah. And then once a day, once a week. How often would you recommend people use it?

Trina Felber [01:40:47]:
I mean, you can do it as often as you want. I would say if you’re doing it once a day, you’re good if you do it once a week. And that’s good for you, that’s great. Once is better than never if you, especially when you buy it and spend the money on it. But you can do it once a day. Red light’s not going to, you know, it’s not going to hurt you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:41:05]:
So I have a device that has microcurrent on one side and the red light on the other side. And so just trying to do that. Would you suggest something like that? Is that okay?

Trina Felber [01:41:14]:
Yeah, I love microcurrent. I do microcurrent to microcurrent stimuli. So in, in my program I teach you about the root causes of aging skin and then the five pillars of beautiful skin. But keeping up your muscle mass the is where Botox comes in. This is one of the problems with Botox is when it paralyzes the muscle. Your muscle is supposed to be when it’s moving and you’re animated. I teach my clients be very animated. Start talking with your face. Not only will people respond better to you because they’re like, oh my God, she’s engaging, but you’re going to be using your face. Think about teenagers like a 16 year old. My daughter is constantly, you know, constantly using her face. And as soon as we get our first job, we sit in front of the computer or we’re behind a desk or something and all animation goes out the door. Like we’re all. And so what happens is we stop using our muscles. And it’s just like when you’re in the gym and you stop working out your muscles atrophy. So atrophy muscle isn’t going to stimulate collagen and elastin. It’s not going to stimulate blood flow as much. And so everything starts to sag and droop and your skin starts to get really thin. Problem with Botox is it does the same thing, but an exaggerated level. Over time your muscle becomes so little that everything is just saggy and saggy and saggy. A Botox actually doesn’t anti age. It actually pre ages or causes you to prematurely age in the long run.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:45]:
Okay.

Trina Felber [01:42:47]:
Gosh.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:50]:
So many other questions. I think. I don’t know. I’m pretty good. If you’re all good, I know we can keep Tina here forever, but I think we hit some of the highlights about the most important things. Thank you so much for your time and generosity and expertise. It was really fun to learn from you. And yeah, like I said, I can’t wait to dive into your course and learn more and be inspired.

Trina Felber [01:43:21]:
So thanks, Kelly. And thank you, ladies, everyone that’s here. I appreciate you all and I hope I see you inside, you know, even the community, like, if you get to join or want to join, there’s a lot that goes on and it, it’s easier than you think. And it doesn’t cost near as much money as people want you to think. It’s actually, actually cheaper to do natural because you need way less products and, you know, it’s not as expensive. So.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:43:46]:
Fantastic. Thank you, everyone. And there’ll be a replay next time, some next week sometime with the whole video, the transcript, all the links, everything that. And if Trina’s willing, we’ll provide the, the slides, too, because I think that would be great for people to have. And in terms of the next webinar, I don’t have anything on the books yet. I think I’m going to take a little break for the summer, so hopefully in the fall. Stay tuned and look forward to seeing you all next time. Thanks again, Trina. Thanks, Michelle Backdrop. And thank you everyone for participating. Loved your questions. Bye.

Trina Felber [01:44:28]:
Bye.

Chat Transcript:

It was a pleasure to host Christina Boyd on our latest webinar, where we explored The Power of Small, Intentional Movement to Transform Your Healing. Christina is a seasoned somatic therapist with over 30 years of experience in Brain Gym and NLP, and she shared how gentle, intentional movement can help rewire the nervous system, release stored trauma, and restore emotional balance. We discussed the fascinating history of somatic therapy, the role of the vagus nerve in healing, and how even the subtlest shifts in the body can create profound transformation. Christina also guided us through a series of movements that left many participants feeling calmer, more grounded, and empowered. If you’ve ever felt stuck in your healing journey, this episode is a must-listen.

To learn more about Christina Boyd’s work and offerings (including her classes, private sessions, her audio guide Nervous System Reset, Introductory Package for Chronic Illness, etc.), be sure to visit her website here.

As always, for those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly [00:00:02]:
Hi and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. This will be a really fun time. I just love spending time with all of you as well as our guest today, Christina Boyd. And I’ll tell you about her in a second. So for those of you who have been here before, please drop your name and where you’re from in the chat. We love to hear of the wide diversity of people who join us from all over the world. It is so cool. Feel free to say wherever you’re from and how you found out about this, this webinar and what you’re hoping to learn from it. I would love to hear all of what’s going on in the chat. My assistant Michelle will also be in the chat and she can be, she can be helping. If there’s any questions that come up, please put them in the Q and A for Christina and I to answer later in the program. Let’s see. And yeah, we took a little hiatus and now we’re back. I’m so excited to be here. Okay. And then there will be a replay. We usually get the replay out sometime next week, early next week. So if you missed it or you have to drop off early or we’re sad that you will leave us, but you can watch the replay later and it’s totally worth it. So please do check out that replay email. And then there’ll also be the. I think we put the transcript in there too in case you want to do that. But this is really an experience. And so for those of you who are here, I’m so glad you’re here to experience this cool somatic therapy known as BrainDem. Okay. Christina Boyd is a movement based somatic therapist and she’s been in practice for 33 years in Flagstaff, Arizona and we’ve never met in person.

Christina Boyd [00:02:14]:
Yet.

Kelly [00:02:15]:
Yet she’s a master practitioner of NLP known as Neuro Linguistic Programming since 1990 and a licensed brain gym consultant since 1992. She’s presented hundreds of workshops, introductions, trainings and worked with all ages from children of five through elders in their 90s. Her expertise includes helping children be successful at school, assisting adults in releasing childhood trauma, and supporting a person’s inner journey to whole. Thank you so much for being with us, Christina. Would you like to share anything more about your story and what brought you here and what inspires you even today?

Christina Boyd [00:02:58]:
Yes. Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. So actually I didn’t know I would end up being a somatic therapist. I was originally going to be a dance therapist and so I got My bachelor’s in dance. But before I got to the master’s, I was introduced to neuro linguistic programming. And so I took that training. And then I ended up taking all of the trainings and NLP in a variety of settings in education, with reading, with children, with adults. That’s actually where I learned how to, to conduct a session so that it was effective. And I continued my training after I received my certification by going to as a training assistant each summer for three years in the 30 day intensive, which is the way I had taken the training. So you are completely immersed in this. And I did that for three summers and it was wonderful. And it was at one of those trainings as a training assistant that another assistant introduced me to Brain Gym. And I had already opened my practice in Flagstaff with nlp and I thought Brain Gym was amazing. So I spent the next year getting licensed. I flew around the country to do that. All the courses, nothing was virtual back then. So I was going everywhere in person and I got my license and I didn’t believe it. So I went back to my clients and I said, you know, I just got licensed in this. I don’t know, I don’t trust it. So if you want to experience it, I won’t charge you. So I did that for three months. I didn’t charge anybody who wanted to experience Brain Gym. And after three months, it was so amazing. They loved it. The results were so consistent. Over the next few years, I really transitioned to the Brain Gym. The. The Brain Gym movements as a technique. I still use a lot of nlp, but it really became a Brain Gym practice. And then I was doing workshops. In order to stay licensed, we have to take continuing education courses. So over the 30 years, I’ve taken a lot in all different fields. The physiology of Brain Gym. I’ve taken infant reflexes and how to integrate them. The brain organization profiles how the relationship of the dominant hemisphere to the dominant eye, ear, hand and foot and how that pretty much predicts how a child is going to learn in school. So as you mentioned, I’ve worked with all ages, taught physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and it’s just been a wonderful journey. And here I am. Kelly, I can’t hear you.

Kelly [00:06:16]:
Sorry, I had to cough. Thank you. So let’s explore a little bit about the history of somatic therapies and where Brain Gym might fit in. I think you have some. Just a brief visual to share with us and.

Christina Boyd [00:06:34]:
Yes.

Kelly [00:06:34]:
And so people can start to have a better sense as to what, what Is this that we’re talking about?

Christina Boyd [00:06:41]:
Yes. I don’t know how brief it is, but it’s interesting because I wanted to know as. As somatic therapy has become more of a thing these days, and people are learning about it, and it is so effective, I realized that Brain Gym is a somatic therapy. And so as I was preparing for this webinar, I thought, I would really like to know where and when somatic therapy got started. So I do have a screen share. I’m going to bring that up now. So I did a little research and look at this. In the 1880s now.

Kelly [00:07:24]:
Wow.

Christina Boyd [00:07:25]:
So that you don’t have to worry about listening to me in reading. I’m going to read this and talk about it so you can read with me. But in the 1880s to the mid-1900s, Pierre Genetic, a French psychologist and physician, he was actually the first to study how trauma can be expressed in both personality and behavior. He said the traumatic experiences can reside outside the conscious mind. So here we have for the first time, internalized but unrecognized memories, which he termed the subconscious, and that these memories can continue to affect a person, causing psychosomatic symptoms. Freud was a contemporary of his, and he’s well known for treating mental illness by looking into the subconscious. Then we get to the mid-1900s, and Wilhelm Reich, who’s an Austrian physician in psychoanalysis and a student of Sigmund Freud, he was the first to claim that the body actually stores trauma. He called it muscular armor, a defense that contained the history of a patient’s trauma. And I thought that was very interesting. And he said this can lead to inflammation, pain, muscular tension, and other body reactions. So this was a new concept, called it body psychology, that there was an actual physiological connection between the mind and the body.

Kelly [00:09:08]:
That’s so amazing how it’s not new, people.

Christina Boyd [00:09:13]:
It’s not new years old, it’s not new. And what you’ll see is that with each, like, generation or several decades, we talk about it differently. That’s because of the culture, but also because of the scientific research.

Kelly [00:09:34]:
Right.

Christina Boyd [00:09:34]:
They didn’t have in the 1930s all the neural imaging that we have today. So we’ve learned a lot. So then we get to the 1960s. Now there was a lot happening. I have, like, three pages on this. Starting in the 1960s through the 1990s. There’s a lot going on. Thomas Hanna, an American philosophy professor and theorist, he’s the one that coined the term somatics of Soma refers to the body and somatics is the internal physical sensations, perceptions and experiences of the body. So he said it’s the body as perceived from within. He developed the idea that all life experiences lead to physical patterns in the body. So that’s pretty much what Wilhelm Reich was saying. Yeah. He published several publications. Bodies in Revolt, A Primer in Somatic Thinking. A journal, so Somatics, a magazine, Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. And Somatics Reawakening the Mind’s Control of movement, flexibility and Health. He and his wife started the Novato Institute, and many of you might be familiar with that, for somatic research and training. And he created the association for Hannah Somatic Education, which still exists today. You can find that on the Web. So during this time, I’m just listing a very few of the different somatic techniques. The Feldenkrais method, the Skinner releasing technique. That was Joan Skinner. That was a dance method of releasing tension and trapped emotions and energy in the body. Somatic experiencing, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Neurosomatic therapy, Sensory motor Motor psychotherapy and emdr. So you can see all of these were beginning to be developed with these different people. And then Peter Levine, an American psychotherapist, he is very influential in the field of somatic therapy. And he developed somatic experiencing. And this is the most well known. And it’s sort of the standard in somatic therapy. And he based his work on Wilhelm Reich’s theories. Attention is directed toward the internal sensations rather than cognitive and emotional experiences. So this is very different than cognitive therapy. And he wrote many books. These are just two of them. In an Unspoken Voice, how the Body Releases trauma and Restores goodness. I think that’s wonderful. Restores goodness? Yes, and waking the Tiger. Healing trauma, the innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences. I just saw him speak in. I participated or attended seminar virtual on somatic healing techniques. Lots of somatic therapists were present. And I saw Peter Levine speak. And he is not necessarily rewriting this book, but the next one is going to be Embracing the Tiger. So we should watch for that. So I’ve summarized here the key elements of contemporary somatic therapy. It emphasizes the body’s pivotal role in processing emotional distress and trauma. The starting point for healing is the body moving out stored, unhealthy energy, Rewiring neural networks established for coping. So as we’re growing up and we are in a dangerous environment, our body will adapt and establish coping behaviors in order to keep ourselves safe. And those get stored in the body. It becomes the main pathway that the neural system will Travel down if there’s anything frightening in the environment. And that is what we need to rewire or move out. The mirror neuron research shows that learning first occurs through the body before it is integrated into our thoughts. We learn what we experience. So the mirror neurons are what we noted in the brain. It’s observing what’s happening in the other person, and we might copy it or we might react to it. Embodied awareness is a key phrase in somatic therapy that is becoming aware of body sensations and what they call felt senses through gentle guidance and various supportive techniques. So there are a number of techniques that guide a person to this awareness and then different ways of relating to this awareness so they are not overpowered by them. And this brings us to Brain Gym. And when I realized really what somatic therapy was, that it is noticing what’s going on in the body, I realized that Brain Gym is that and also nlp, because nlp, it is guiding a person to notice how they phrased it, was how we code our experiences. It might have an image, it might have a feeling, it might have a sound. And as we become aware of that, then the practitioner helps them. It’s like move that around in their experience, in their mind’s eye, so to speak, and that changes their experience. The difference with Brain Gym is its actual movements. It began as an educational model in the classroom. And what sets Brain Gym apart from other somatic therapies is that it is specific movement patterns. And I’m going to be taking you through some a little bit later. And these movement patterns stimulate neural changes within the brain that result in new thinking, new behaviors, emotional equilibrium, and increased abilities. And they saw this in the children, in the classroom. At the core of this work is the research that shows that movement is crucial for physical, neurological, and emotional development and health. The fetus developed through movement. The infant continued developing through movement. And without movement, the brain cannot develop. Our personality cannot develop. So Dr. Dennison was a pioneer in educational kinesiology, which is the study of movement in relation to learning, achievement, and life balance. He was a professional educator and reading specialist. He is an authority on how cognitive and academic skills are developed. I’m sharing this with you to show you that he spent years. He spent 17 years studying this, researching it, before he met up with his future wife, Gail. He received the Phi Delta Kappa Award for outstanding research at the University of Southern California. He was granted a doctorate in education for his research in learning theory, reading achievement, and its relationship to cognitive development and thinking skills. And if you rewire the brain for these things, you cannot separate that from our emotional life. They are connected. He worked with experts in various fields including motor development, primitive reflexes that was incorporated into Brain Gym visual and auditory development and brought in elements of dance, sports and physical therapy. Gail, who I believe was his Touch for Health instructor, her background was in dance, natural vision training, acupressure and Touch for Health. Touch for Health incorporates acupressure massage points to stimulate energy to improve physical conditions and mental and emotional states. And when they met up and joined forces, she brought in a lot of the Touch for Health, the meridian work and all of that into the Brain Gym movements. And this is key to why this work is so effective. They developed this five step balance process. It’s a very specific sequence that offers a reliable and effective framework for change. What it does is it brings our brains into balanced whole brain functioning which releases and rewires neural networks that are functioning under stress. And when we talk about whole brain functioning, we’re not just talking left and right, the left and right hemispheres. They also worked with the top of the brain and the bottom of the brain, the neocortex and the limbic system so that we can think and feel at the same time. And that energy flow needs to be smooth and functioning and also the front of the brain, prefrontal cortex and the brain stem and how that needs to work fluidly together to be effective in life. Pace stands for positive, active, clear and energetic. And then we set the intention end goal. And this is a big part of, of the session. We might spend a great deal of the session here because this is really moving into that neural network that we want to change. We notice that’s what the somatic therapists would call that inner experience, Experience the body from within. Then we do the movements and then we have reflection. What are we feeling now? We’re, I’m not actually going to take you through this sequence today with some movements. And so in today’s constellation of somatic or body based therapeutic change techniques, Brain Gym provides a unique approach because it uses specific targeted movement patterns that in themselves it’s actually the movements that realign the brain body neural connections. However, it’s when we do the movements, when we have sort of shone a light on that neural network that we need to rewire. So we’ve sort of activated it. When we do this process, it allows for more efficient processing of sensory input for processing past and present trauma. Because we do want to think about it in a different way. It provides an unwinding of deep complex Emotional patterns that are held in the body. This result in a complete reorganization of the neural networks to improve psychological states. It will release stored stress and trauma, allowing clarity and self awareness and personal autonomy. That is definitely something that develops and noticing which is the body sensations, the felt senses, the interstates, perceiving the body from within. So that brings us to Brain Gym and how I use Brain Gym today. That wasn’t really short, but that will give you a sense of how Brain Gym fits into this quite long history of somatic therapy and understanding that we do store it in our bodies and we need to find a way to move it out.

Kelly [00:22:13]:
Absolutely. Yeah. I, I love this and I really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through the history because I had no idea how extensive a history it was for this, this concept that the mind and the body are linked. So it is really brilliant to see that humans have recognized this and talked about it and, and developed methods really working on the trauma and the stored, disconnected parts of the body. So would you like to have us have an experience, take you through an experience?

Christina Boyd [00:22:59]:
Sure. So what we can do, if, if people have water with them, that’s good, we just sip a little water. And so for you, so you can experience it in the best way possible, I will suggest that you choose some issue in your life. Please don’t pick the biggest one, but some issue in your life that’s stressful. It could be a person, it could be an event that has happened in the past and it’s still rolling around in your mind and your emotions. It could be something upcoming that you want to feel better about and not be so overwhelmed about. And then you notice what, as you think about that, in nlp, they would say, okay, so where do you hold that image or that feeling? You might say, oh my God, is this sitting on my head? Or it’s just like right in front of my face. This might not be really obvious when we start, but at the end, by contrast, you might notice, oh, oh, it’s farther away now, so notice that. And also notice the body sensations. Do you feel anxious? Do you feel heaviness anywhere? What is it? Do you feel cloudy in your head? And then just write one or two words down about what your current state is. It might be sad, it might be lots of discomfort, but you want to write down what you’re sensing and feeling.

Kelly [00:24:40]:
Okay, so for example, I feel kind of when I think about this, this thing, I feel a heaviness on my chest. I feel that my breath is more shallow. For example, there’s actually even a constriction in my throat.

Christina Boyd [00:25:02]:
That’s it. That’s what we call felt senses. The body sensations how you are experiencing it in your body, not in your.

Kelly [00:25:10]:
Mind, which is always hard for me to do.

Christina Boyd [00:25:14]:
Right, Christina, it’s not how you’re thinking about it.

Kelly [00:25:17]:
Right, right.

Christina Boyd [00:25:19]:
That’s a good distinction. So I’m going to start with to what we call pre birth movements. So the fetus is moving in the womb, and it is through that movement that it is both developing the brain and the body. But also the neural system is developing, and it’s even responding at that time to external influences, its mother’s voice, its mother’s experiences. It can hear sounds outside the womb. So, again, these are very, very simple movements. And as I’m going to take you through a number of them, and on some of them, you might feel certain things shifts or changes. On some it’s like, okay, I’m done with this and. But it’s still doing something. So this one is simply, you have your hands on your chest and you just go up to the ears and you come down and I suggest you close your eyes and you can start. Your starting place could be that issue that you are dealing with. And then you can just let that go and be aware of what is going on in your body, in your senses. You can do this at your own tempo. Now, as I’m taking a client through this, I’m thinking, wow, what is this doing? This is so simple. And yet afterwards, they’ll tell me they had some amazing experience or a shift in feeling or they remembered something. So I just never know.

Kelly [00:27:20]:
Oh, yeah. I. I immediately felt more calm.

Christina Boyd [00:27:23]:
Yes.

Kelly [00:27:24]:
My breath immediately deepened.

Christina Boyd [00:27:28]:
We’ll do it one more time. Okay. So let’s pause a moment and drink a sip of water. Water activates the neural networks. We want to keep that going. So we’ll do one more pre birth movement. So the hands are crossed, and then you just switch again. You can close your eyes or keep your eyes open, keep your breath going. If you begin to hold your breath, then just pause and take in another breath.

Kelly [00:28:21]:
It’s so interesting how one side is so much more comfortable than the other.

Christina Boyd [00:28:26]:
Mm. And yet we need to activate both combinations. Yes. And sometimes in the brain gym world, we call that lateralized. In other words, one side is doing most of the work and we want to balance that out.

Kelly [00:28:48]:
And I found when I was doing my sessions with you, that was always the clue to me that I had completed the. The exercise when things felt more balanced yes, exactly.

Christina Boyd [00:29:00]:
And in a session, I wait until the client is complete in this sequence. I can’t do that.

Kelly [00:29:08]:
No, you guys are on your own.

Christina Boyd [00:29:11]:
That’s right. Okay, so now I’m going to move back to my chair. We could do this next one in the chair. So I think I’ll turn a little bit at an angle. This is called the spinal lift. So this is. We just roll down, and then you’re going to roll up very slowly or at your own pace, until the top of the head goes to the ceiling, not the nose. And you’re feeling that spine lengthen up and the two sides of the body sort of float down. We are activating that neural. The spinal cord, those neural networks that move up, which may have been interrupted during any part of. Before birth, during birth, after birth, for whatever reason. And what we’re doing around that issue, we are like loosening that up. So let’s do it like three times on your own time, just drop down. And then one vertebrae at a time, you’re just going to gently roll up, drop the shoulders. The shoulders in the head are the last thing to come up. And you’re feeling that energy go out the top of your head. Shoulders are resting down. And then you’ll drop the chin and roll down again. You can also do this on your knees, on the floor, on a mat, if that feels good to you. And we’ll do it one more time, drop the chin. And last time we’ll roll up and feel that lengthening in the spine. So the next one we’re going to do is we’re simply going to be rubbing the back of the hand, like between the. The. Those tendons that go down there. And while we’re doing that, we’re going to be moving the tongue in the mouth. We might look a little funny. Now, what this is doing is when a baby is nursing, they’re also kneading with the hands, or at least we hope they have that opportunity, because the mouth and the hands are connected. This is why we talk with things in our hands. And their mouth will move when we’re concentrating on learning an instrument or something. So this is actually a bonding movement, bonding exercise to release that. The disconnect that we might feel.

Kelly [00:32:09]:
And we’re rubbing in between all of the tendons in the hand.

Christina Boyd [00:32:12]:
Yes, the whole hand.

Kelly [00:32:13]:
Okay. And then there’s no pattern for the tongue. You’re just kind of moving it around.

Christina Boyd [00:32:18]:
Sometimes there is, but today we’re just moving it around.

Kelly [00:32:21]:
Okay.

Christina Boyd [00:32:25]:
So let’s switch hands.

Kelly [00:32:26]:
Okay.

Christina Boyd [00:32:27]:
Breathing into the stomach. All right, so let’s rest a moment. We just check in. And I see you’re yawning.

Kelly [00:32:51]:
Yes.

Christina Boyd [00:32:52]:
Yawning actually is a release of energy. Good. So that’s good. That means a lot of stress has been released and things have shifted a little bit.

Kelly [00:33:01]:
Great.

Christina Boyd [00:33:01]:
So we also work with lymphatic points, and we’re going to that raglan sleeve area. We can take both hands, and we’re just going to rub in that raglan sleeve area, stimulating the lymph system. Okay. This is activating again, some of the neural networks that may have been congested or the lymphatic system congested. So we just rub that. Keep breathing into your stomach, and you rest down, taking a breath, and we just. We just notice. And now we’re going to place our fingers on the. Above the eyebrows about an inch. And we just do a very light circular massage. These are neurovascular points. These are from Touch for Health. This helps to get the energy moving between the two hemispheres, and many people will feel just a lot of relief as they do this. All right, then, from our Vision Gym program, Gail Denison did a lot of research when she was into vision and developed what we call our vision gyms. Vision is connected to all of our senses. As we take in that information, we have neural networks that are set in place. A lot has to do with the adrenal glands. With your fingers or fists, you’re just going to massage on either side of the belly button and really focus on relaxing those muscles. Just sort of let your stomach sort of fall out and just let your breath be easy. Drop your shoulders, and now you’re going to press downward and lift your rib cage. As you’ve taken a breath, you’re going to look to the ceiling. You’re expanding those stomach muscles. And then you come back. And then we’ll repeat, drop the shoulders, relax the stomach muscles, do this little massage, breathing in. This is relaxing. A lot of adrenal stress relates to the eyes. As we are observing things, it’s also our internal perspective. And again, press down. Lift the rib cage as you breathe in and breathe out and come back. And we’ll do one more massage. Breathe into your belly. Relax those muscles. And last time, press down, breathe in, lift the rib cage, expand those thumb muscles, and come back. So let’s take a moment and just check inside. We have just a few more to do. Check inside and notice what might be different now. A little bit more opening, a little bit more expansion. Maybe you’ve had some realizations or AHAs maybe and maybe not. It really doesn’t matter. Okay, so we’re going to do what we call our knee hugs. We’re simply taking hold of the knee. The back is straight and we are pulling in. And what this is doing is releasing that stress that accumulates in the low back and then goes up the back. So we just pull that knee in, and then we’re going to flex the foot and point. Just flex and point. So this is relieving that stress, opening up those neural channels that go all the way down to the tailbone. Keep your breathing going and let’s do the other leg. Pull in. Your back is nice and straight, and you’re going to flex and pull. This also helps to begin to release the tendon guard reflex, which is a reflexive action. Pulls the body back. Starts in the big toe when we either begin to lose our balance physically or emotionally. If we are suddenly surprised, like the startle response. And this is beginning to release that. All right, so let’s do some of our cross crawls. Okay, so we are crossing, and you want to make sure that you are going to the opposite leg and that the shoulders are rotating with you. So that gets the core movement connecting the two sides of the brain and body, which is so important for emotional processing as well as cognitive processing, and just begin to feel that rhythm.

Kelly [00:38:58]:
I’m glad we don’t have to move our eyes, too. That was really hard.

Christina Boyd [00:39:01]:
I thought about that, and I thought, well, no, we won’t do that today. If use the back of your chair. As long as it’s not a roller, maybe put your hands on the wall. We are going to do our calf pump. So what this is doing, this is really releasing that stress in the low back, also in the psoas muscle, which holds a lot of stress. We’re going to breathe in as we come up. We blow the air out as we press that heel down. So you’re going to feel a lengthening of that leg muscle, and that is actually activating a release all the way up to the head. Breathing in when you come up and breathing out when you go down and breathing in when you come up, out when you go down. And we’ll do it one more time with this leg in, back, breathing in and breathing out. And so now we’re going to switch legs. And I have found, for whatever reason, this is often a difficult thing to coordinate. Breathing in, coming up, breathing out, bending that knee, which simply means that we need to work with it in order to get that Awareness of forward and back and up and down. Breathing in as we come up, breathing out as we go down. Breathing in and breathing out. And one more time, breathing in and breathing out. All right, so let’s sit. Well, I will sit. You’re sitting. And we’re going to do our brain buttons. We’re going to close this little sequence with brain buttons and then our range and hookups. So hand is on the belly button underneath the collarbone. Thumb on one side, fingers are on the other. And this is. These are touch for health points into the kidney meridian. We’re going to breathe into our stomach. And while we do this, we’re going to move our eyes side to side. Now, that might seem simple, but it might be a little challenging. See if you can hold your head steady. Just let your eyes move. Move slowly. See if you can move them smoothly. So we are crossing that, the visual midline breathing into your stomach. This is helping the body know left and right. Also moving energy up out of our fight orf flight centers. And I think we’re going to throw in the thinking hat before we do our hookups. So this is unrolling the ears, Unrolling the ears from the top around to the earlobe. And this is activating our auditory processing because we do process information differently in each ear. And now I’m going to have you add humming. This is the vagus nerve that connects with the vocal cords, and it’s very calming. So we just hum. This could actually silence a lot of internal talking to yourself. All our little auditory tapes that go on, often critical. So this often people will tell me afterwards, gosh, my brain is silent. All right, so let’s end this sequence with. We call our braid gym hookups. We’re crossing our ankles and then just crossing over the chest. Now you’re going to rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth because that acts as an acupressure point for the limbic system. That’s the midbrain. It is the brain that stores a lot of emotion. It’s the brain that sort of evaluates, am I safe in my environment? And it is our relational brain. So breathe into your stomach. Just let everything settle down. So this is giving the body a chance to integrate what we’ve just experienced. Then we uncross the ankles, and the second part to this is we place our fingertips together. This is always the second part of the. Of the hookups. Okay, so let’s sip a little water. And then we’re going to do our noticing. So think about that issue. Whatever you Chose to think about and notice a couple of things. One, does it feel like it’s in a different place, or do you kind of see it in a different place than you did before? And is it larger or smaller or anything different there? And what are you noticing inside? Do you feel differently? What. What’s your internal sense? And if you were to write it down, write it down and then look at what you originally wrote and see what the difference is. Maybe you just feel calmer. Maybe you feel more in your center or more grounded or more neutral about whatever this issue is. And that’s what we call a reflection. And we are noticing. And as we do that, through subsequent sessions, we are literally realigning the. The neural system in relation to this issue and our life in general. So there is a little sequence pattern that I hope everybody enjoyed.

Kelly [00:45:52]:
That was super fun.

Christina Boyd [00:45:54]:
Yeah, everybody’s going to experience it differently. Yeah, yeah.

Kelly [00:46:01]:
If people want to put in the chat, what about their experience? What did you think? What did you feel? How much. What changes have happened? We’d love to hear that in the chat. Obviously, you know, you can take as long or as short as you want if you want to share that information. I can share. I definitely feel so much more grounded, so much more at peace. The overwhelm and the heaviness is completely gone. The issue is still there. It’s kind of much smaller and definitely further away than it was. And. And I have a sense that I have the inner resources. I don’t have to be overwhelmed by this. I can. I can figure this out, and it’s. It’s going to all be okay. So thank you, Christina, for welcome.

Christina Boyd [00:47:03]:
Empowerment is one of the things that comes out of this.

Kelly [00:47:07]:
Yes.

Christina Boyd [00:47:07]:
Yeah.

Kelly [00:47:10]:
And. And then if you have specific questions, please drop them in the Q and A, because we’ll go there for sure. But I definitely want to hear about your experiences, as does Christina in the chat. So Carlene said, thank you so much. Christina mentioned dominant side of the brain being aligned with the dominant side of the body. I suspect there’s a question there, people. Let’s see. Edith said she felt lighter. Oh, the chat is going too fast. Some people. Let’s see. Maria said, lighter and calmer. The event is smaller, moved outside of her body.

Christina Boyd [00:47:59]:
Wonderful.

Kelly [00:48:01]:
Marilyn. Hi. Marilyn said, I went from anger about the person to deep compassion and a gentle feeling of love. How cool is that?

Christina Boyd [00:48:13]:
Oh, wonderful. I’d like to say something about that, because when I went through, it wasn’t this experience, but when I led a group through one of my classes. I, I chose an experience for myself and it was very similar to that. You know, the foreground background. I had a very difficult conversation coming up and the foreground feeling was the anger and, and fear or dislike. And then afterwards it, the, the foreground was my love and compassion and that’s what led in, in the conversation. So it is very similar to that.

Kelly [00:48:52]:
Yes. Yeah. So beautiful. Thank you, Marilyn, for sharing. Jess said, thank you so much. Brain Gym is so powerful. I’ve been working with Christina for a couple of years and to be here today means so much. The sequence also helped me feel more grounded too. Karen said, so very helpful. I can feel inside of myself. Kathy said she feels calmer, a little fatigued. Christy said, this is quite helpful. I feel less anxious about this situation. Thank you.

Christina Boyd [00:49:28]:
Yay. Feeling tired afterwards is very common. It’s the way I explain it is. It’s like, like we’re having a busy work week and we’re working, working, working, working. And the weekend comes and so now I’m going to get all this yard work done. But you wake up and it’s like, oh my gosh, I’m so tired. It’s when you can finally let down, then you feel that fatigue. And that’s the way it is with Brain Gym. Our neural system is working really hard, but it’s not working in an efficient way because of all of our coping mechanisms. In Brain Gym, we call it compensation. There are a lot of workarounds, just like on a computer, two or three different ways to accomplish the same task. Well, we do this in life. We have to make compensatory actions in order to deal with a very stressful situation. And then that workaround begins, set in place. But it takes more energy. So when we release that, the neural system functions so much more easily. So I thought I’d address the hemisphere that question. I’m not sure what the question was, but. So we do have a dominant hemisphere and I mean, some people question that, but the working model is that we have a dominant hemisphere, right brain or left brain, and those have different characteristics. But the right hemisphere does control the left side of the body and the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. They know that from science and people who have strokes. And then if it’s on the right side, it’s going to limit the left side. And then we have a dominant hand. We’re either left handed or right handed. We have a dominant foot. We kick with our right or kick with our left. Yep. And a dominant eye. And that will affect how we read and that type of thing. And we have mixed dominance. Some people have right brain dominant and left eye dominant or left hand. And it’s this combination of things that, that’s the brain organization profiles. I call it the learning profile. And that’s one of the first things I do when I’m working with a child, because that will tell me immediately how that child functions in the classroom. But it is also how we function in the world as well. And so there isn’t, if you’re right brain dominant, it doesn’t mean anything about your intelligence or left brain dominance or which eye or hand is dominant. It can have mixed dominance. And Dr. Denison spent a lot of time studying that in his learning center in California. Way back in the 70s. He worked with all these children. They didn’t have special ed back then. And so he worked with all these children who were struggling in school, and they all had mixed dominance. And that was his little laboratory for these movements that he was learning about.

Kelly [00:52:30]:
You also said something that was really interesting that I have a question about. So you said that we hear differently left side versus right, right side. Can you share more about that?

Christina Boyd [00:52:43]:
So, because the right ear is opposite the left hemisphere and the left hemisphere is more about linear, listening to things linearly, the details, the meaning, the cognitive aspect, that’s what the right ears tend to focus in on. And the left ear, because it is connected to the right hemisphere and the right hemisphere is more about tone, tempo, the emotion of it, the left ear is going to hear more of that. So it doesn’t really matter what word you use if you say I love you, but if you say it in an angry tone, then that’s what the left ear is going to pick up. And so if, and also, I mean, this is a very brief primer on brain organization profiles. But if somebody is right brain dominant, these are the kids I see. I’ve seen one left brain dominant child in my entire career in my office, really, it’s the right brain dominant who then have maybe a right ear, right eye and right ear. And that’s what we call blocked. Because this, the information from this eye, you know, it needs to go over to the other side of the brain, but it has to get through all that busyness of the right brain functioning. And so these, and then the ear. So these children, if they have a right eye dominant right ear and right brain and right hand, they’re overwhelmed. In a regular classroom, there’s too much sound coming in. It takes too much time to get over to the opposite side outside and too much visual stuff. And, and that’s where Brain Gym started, was to help these children, however, with adults that can create their own stress points in terms of trying to function in the world, raise a family or do a job. And it’s just too much information. So we get all that straightened out and once they understand their profile and how to work with it, and then they do brain gen to speed up that transmission, they do much better.

Kelly [00:55:02]:
Fascinating. So I’m clearly living in my right brain most of the time. Right. And I’m right eye dominant, I’m right ear dominant, right hand dominant. And I had amblyopia when I was 4 diagnosed and a lazy eye on my left side. And I have tinnitus and hearing loss on my left side. So clearly I could use some more Brain Gym. Right?

Christina Boyd [00:55:48]:
It, it would help. I mean, these are the children I work with. And my. One of the main things I do is educate the parent and the child that first of all they’re not wrong or broken and they’re certainly not stupid neurologically. It just takes a little longer for all that information to get over to their left more detail oriented brain. But you know what, once it’s over there, these people have an amazing ability to use all that information in a much more creative, big picture way. They think out of the box, they come up with these amazing solutions and it’s like, how did you come up with that?

Kelly [00:56:28]:
Oh, wait, but I’m much more analytical. So I actually am left brain dominant. Correct.

Christina Boyd [00:56:35]:
If you are more analytical and you find organization easy and you can track things and keep track of things, time, and you live by your calendar and yes, you’re probably left brain.

Kelly [00:56:46]:
Okay, so I’m left brain dominant. And then it makes sense that my eye and my ear are right, right side dominant. Okay, got it. All right, so I can still benefit from Brain Gym.

Christina Boyd [00:57:01]:
Yes. So we. So Brain Gym has two, like two aspects to it. One is that neurological processing, which we want to speed up, make it easier to happen. I call that sort of the mechanical helping a child read, helping them listen in class, helping them write their, their report or whatever they’re writing. And then it has that sort of the, the emotional inner state of being that, that it can rebalance if we’re in fight or flight or if we’re in overwhelm. And that’s because it does work on the vagus nerve and the psoas muscle. I, you know, let me just quickly pull up picture of the vagus nerve. I’ve mentioned that twice. And I don’t know if people are very familiar with it, but it is. It’s somewhere. Here it is. Okay, so when we talk about. Oops, I minimized it. There we go. I meant to enlarge it. Okay, so it is a tenth cranial nerve, and it is. Everybody’s talking about the vagus nerve now. And actually the person who brought this to our attention was Dr. Stephen Porges in the 90s and his polyvagal theory. So I’m not going to get into that, but he’s really the one that put it on the map. And it’s become more and more, you know, in the news, so to speak, in. In the therapeutic world, because it creates connections between the brain and several organ systems and regions of the body. It go. It innervates and it goes through the tongue, the throat, the vocal cords. That’s why we were humming. Gastrointestinal tract, the lungs, the heart, spleen lives, liver, kidneys. It’s involved in so much speech, swallowing, eye contact, facial expressions, and the ability to tune into other people’s voices. So as we work, many of the Brain Gym activities will be activating this. Now, Paul and Gail Denison didn’t know that way back in the center 70s, this is. I. I can tell you that all of the brain research has supported everything that they have done in developing Brain Gem. All of it. I’ve been watching it throughout the 90s. And this goes into the intestinal tract. So this is a major. It’s connected to the sympathetic nervous system. So it responds immediately to stress, overwhelm, fear, and it can get stored in that. And we have also the psoas muscle. They know that the psoas muscle is connected to the diaphragm through the little extensions called a crura. So through fascia and neural connections, it is connected to the diaphragm. So when we breathe and walk, we are activating this. Actually, it’s activated in everything we do. And it is also connected to the sympathetic nervous system. And this will hold trauma. So it’s not only a balancing between the upper and the lower body. It’s the only muscle that connects the upper body. And then down here, it connects to the. The leg bone. So many of the Brain gym movements, that’s our. The calf pump that we were doing, Warrior one in yoga, activates that. So these are the organs that we literally will be stimulating as we do Brain gym. And as we stimulate them, we are releasing trauma that is held in that.

Kelly [01:01:09]:
So cool. Yeah, yeah. Every step we take, we Activate that. So as muscle.

Christina Boyd [01:01:13]:
That’s true.

Kelly [01:01:14]:
It’s kind of important.

Christina Boyd [01:01:16]:
That’s true. That’s why these movements work. We are literally activating neural networks, organ systems in the body. The vagus nerve. And none of that was known back in the 70s. We have all that research right now.

Kelly [01:01:30]:
Wow. So when you say neural networks, what does that mean exactly? Can you explain that to people?

Christina Boyd [01:01:44]:
Well, for example, the. How would I explain that? So one cell does not move my arm. I don’t have one cell in the brain that said, okay, move arm. Starts as a fleeting thought. Hardly. It’s not even a conscious mind thought, but I want to move my arm. And so a whole lot of cells get together. They coordinate together to move my arm. That’s a neural network or many neural networks. I, I’m not that versed in physiology to.

Kelly [01:02:26]:
No, no, it’s okay.

Christina Boyd [01:02:27]:
Explain in detail. But that has to be a whole coordinated function. So let’s say a child grows up in an environment with an alcoholic parent. That’s a lot of unpredictability, a lot of fear, maybe some physical abuse. And in order to cope, they’re going to learn that, I better take care of that person over there, make sure he’s happy, don’t get in his way, Be quiet and get small. That is a reactive pattern engaging a lot of the systems of the body that gets set in place. And this is what PTSD is. So one thing happens, the door slams or you’re out with friends and somebody gets too drunk, that’s a trigger. And that neural pattern will fire, as they say, and that person may have to leave that, leave the group of friends because it’s too much for them. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, he’s a Dutch psychoanalyst. He started studying Vietnam veterans in 1978 and PTSD. And as the decades went on, neuroimaging came the development in science. And he would actually watch their brains active. And they, when they talked about the traumatic experience, the limbic brain was firing, it was really active. And at some point the cognitive centers went dark and they were only feeling it. And his research has shown how trauma is literally stored in the body. He’s, he’s internationally known as, you know, with work with trauma, and it was with veterans and Elaine Shapiro who developed emdr. And that’s bilateral stimulation. I have to say, those of us in nlp, we’ve been doing eye movements from the get go because it’s so powerful. And she was actually trained in nlp.

Kelly [01:04:46]:
Interesting.

Christina Boyd [01:04:47]:
But that bilateral movement activates things. And she worked with veterans and so they know from these experiences that these neural networks get set in place. They’re patterns. It’s like a. It’s like a pathway that gets set and then the trigger will make that fire and the person will feel that. So that’s.

Kelly [01:05:09]:
And then what Brain Gym does is it helps reset the pattern to exactly. Or balanced pattern.

Christina Boyd [01:05:16]:
Exactly. It’s somehow it loosens it up and then when it goes back, it goes back to a healthier, more natural pattern. So really what people hire me to do is to find that network. I mean, we’re not going to identify. It’s over here, over here. The brain is too complex, but we sort of activate it. And that’s through my guidance in the session. And it’s at that point that we do the movements. And this is actually Dr. Dennison’s contribution to this field. If you just do these movements, what we call in the clear, they’re just movements.

Kelly [01:06:00]:
Right.

Christina Boyd [01:06:00]:
But if you do, for example, the experience I took you through today, think about it, notice what you’re feeling. But we really go in depth in a session and then when we do the movements, it’s like we are at that place and then the movements can be effective to loosen that up.

Kelly [01:06:20]:
And that’s the same idea with EMDR where you’re contemplating the upset, whatever that is. If you remember the trauma, you can do that. You don’t have to. You can just how you feel about it and do that cross lateralization processing. So very cool. We do have a couple questions and then I have a couple more questions. So I just want to make sure that we answer these. So someone asked, I recently learned the term neurodivergence, which seems like a catch all term. Could you speak to this from your lovely broad education and experience?

Christina Boyd [01:06:59]:
Well, neurodivergence is the current terminology for somebody who is not acting what we call normal. It could be something, somebody who has a developmental disability or somebody who has a different way of being. And it’s the way we refer to these people who do not fit into that part of the spectrum that we call normal cognitive ability or normal behavior.

Kelly [01:07:34]:
Right. So other labels might be autism, adhd. Yes. Behavioral issues. You know, you can talk about mental health, different diagnoses as well. That is a catch. That is exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s a catch all phrase. It’s a catch all that hopefully removes the judgment about it too.

Christina Boyd [01:07:58]:
Exactly, yes.

Kelly [01:08:02]:
The next question, I’m just going to jump. So Kathy asked, do practitioners typically Work with kids only. Do they work with adults as well? Specifically around nervous system regulation?

Christina Boyd [01:08:16]:
There are hundreds of people like me licensed in Brain Gym and we all find our own focus. And I work with all ages. I work with children in school to get them up to grade level or behavioral issues. It works like magic with behavioral issues because that’s a lot of sensory processing that they can’t, that they find difficult. And then about 10 years ago, I started working with the older population, and that’s my. I developed a class. We haven’t talked about my classes yet. So the older population to maintain cognitive function, to keep the brain bright and functioning well as we age. And then five years ago, I was asked to teach a class for the Brain Injury association of Arizona for brain injured people. And that’s been so successful. We are in our fifth year and that’s online. So each practitioner will focus on the population that they want. There are some Brain Gym practitioners who only work with children. Some only work with people with physical disabilities. Some people only work with people with dementia or Parkinson’s and that type of thing. The thing is, it’s applicable everywhere because it activates the areas of the brain in that brain body connection that if there’s something that is not functioning optimally, it will straighten it out. This is how it can support people with a physical illness. And that’s another thing I’ve done over the last year and a half, worked with a lot of people with physical illness. And what it does, it’s. So I call it like the emotional overlay or that stress of having to deal with all of the doctors and the disappointment and the trying this and the trying that and not feeling good. So Brain Gym can’t necessarily magically fix these things, but the substrate of emotional stress, of disappointment, of hopelessness, that Brain Gym can address. So it can strengthen somebody’s inner drive or inner, inner motivation and keep them more uplifted and positive. And when you change that energy, that helps the body physically. So it’s sort of a support. So if somebody is willing to, you know, look at maybe how they’ve been coping and willing to make some changes and see what their past was like. Because I do take a full history and I’m looking for traumas and some people, you know, like, why do you need to know this? I’m. I’m talking about my current stress. But our current stress rests on top of everything that we’ve experienced. And as we begin to release that, then we are able to function much more easily with any of the challenges that we’re facing. So in that way, it really does support our healing process if we’re dealing with chronic illness.

Kelly [01:11:43]:
Yes. One more question and then we’ll wrap up and I’ll let you share more about what you have going on. Can Christina and Dr. McCann speak to what are the latest physical tests that one can do at home on their own to assess the overall state of one’s vagus nerve or vagus nerves functioning in specific areas of the body, like the throat, where swallowing has become a chronic issue? Are there machines like VitalScan ANS or other ones that are measuring nervous system health accurately? And what do these quantify? Accurately and inaccurately? I’ll let you take that one to start.

Christina Boyd [01:12:27]:
Well, I, I am not that versed medically or technically in terms of these devices. I’ve heard of many of these devices and people you can also buy on Amazon, something to calm the vagus nerve in terms. So I can speak generally to this.

Kelly [01:12:44]:
Sure.

Christina Boyd [01:12:45]:
In terms of whether it is affecting the throat and the ability to speak, you know, whether emotionally or sing or breathing. Is it affecting your breathing? Where is it affecting you? In the Brain gym model, we look at the whole person, the whole brain body connection, and we might not focus on what appears to be one the problem. And I’ll give you an example. In my first summer along, in my first 10 years of practice, I was working with this little boy. He was 8 or 9, and it was on reading. Okay. He was not up to level in reading. And I had worked with him for five sessions and I knew he should have been improving, but he wasn’t. And so I asked his mother about traumas. There was no trauma. They didn’t move. There was no divorce, no death of a pet or a relative. And so I said, so what about his birth? And she says, oh, his birth was very traumatic. The cord was wrapped around his neck and it was traumatic for her, traumatic for him. So I, I did gave her a session to remove her energy. Always work as a parent when I work with a child because there’s that energetic loop. And then with a little boy, he’s not going to consciously remember his birth, but that would have put in motion that moro reflex. So I balanced for that and he shot to the top of his class.

Kelly [01:14:21]:
Wow.

Christina Boyd [01:14:22]:
That is how we look at the whole picture because the brain is saying, you want me to put my head down and look at these black marks on the page? And my brain is saying, wait a minute, I have to be careful here. So if I were to approach Somebody who’s having a problem with their voice, I would probably give them a humming exercise to do to calm. But I would also approach it in terms of what might be an underlying historical pattern for them, which happens to be showing up in this particular way. So that’s the best way I can address that question. I don’t know all of the details for these devices that they have.

Kelly [01:15:09]:
Yes, thank you for that, Christina. That was a brilliant answer. I’m not entirely sure either. Dr. Neal Nathan would talk about opening the mouth and observing the. The frenula. No. Oh, my gosh. I forget the medical term. Observing the.

Christina Boyd [01:15:39]:
Whatever thing.

Kelly [01:15:40]:
What. Anyway, the palate raising or not. And whether or not the. The little thing that hangs down in the middle of the. Your throat. Oh, my goodness. Brain fart. And if it’s pulling to one side or the other when you’re saying, I think that that can give you a clue. I’m sure there’s a bunch of videos on YouTube. If you look at how do I assess my vagus nerve at home, there might be some different videos on that. As to that particular device, I’m not familiar with it. I’m more familiar with things like heart math or using an aura ring where you’re looking at hrv. And those are definitely ways. So heart rate variability is definitely a way to assess the resilience of the autonomic nervous system. Let’s see. I think. And then another patient asked about if arthritis. Can you tell me whether having arthritis, which makes the exercise where we curve down painful in the cervical spine, is it connected to the vagus nerve or would that be something separate?

Christina Boyd [01:16:58]:
Is the cervical spine connected to the vagus nerve?

Kelly [01:17:02]:
I think arthritis. Has arthritis in her cervical spine and is asking is the pain when she bends over and with the exercises, is that. Is there some sort of connection with a dysfunctional vagus nerve or is it likely because of the arthritis?

Christina Boyd [01:17:24]:
I would say it’s likely because of the arthritis. Now, that being said, again, I’m not in all the details of the vagus nerve. Um, it does. It does go through. It doesn’t. My understanding is the vagus nerve does not go through the spine. It connects with the organs. So it’s more in the front of the body, you know, the tongue and the vocal cords. When we do brain, we totally adapt. Okay. Because it is. It’s really energy work because the nervous system has energy. So when we talk about energy, we’re really talking about the nervous system because we put off different energy when we are nervous and afraid. And when we are calm, people feel something different from us. So energy, you know, energy work is not really esoteric. It’s about the nervous system and how it’s functioning. Is it sending out adrenaline? Is it sending out cortisol? Is it sending out. Sending out, you know, the, the, the calming thing. So I, I would say the pain is probably the arthritis. And we don’t let that get in the way of adapting the movements because it is the intention that will shift things.

Kelly [01:18:45]:
Right. So somebody, regardless of physical capabilities or lack of physical capabilities, brain gym can be adjusted so that you get the same nervous system support.

Christina Boyd [01:18:58]:
Yes. So people with brain injury. I have people in my class who are in wheelchair. I have one man who can only partially use his left arm. And, and they adapt. And it is the. And they know from research that if you think about raising your arm, it is moving into those pathways to. In your brain to move your arm. And so you just think it. Because it’s like a mental exercise. And so we adapt so much. And these, you know, in this brain injury class we have 16, 17, 18 people every week. And they’ve been coming. We started this class in 2020 and some of these people have been coming for several years now because they get such help. This one man is now when he goes to the Phoenix airport, he can walk from one plane to the next plane. He used to have to take a wheelchair.

Kelly [01:19:56]:
Wow.

Christina Boyd [01:19:57]:
So it can have physical improvements. I never know. I mean.

Kelly [01:20:05]:
Right.

Christina Boyd [01:20:05]:
And he’s doing other things. They doing physical therapy and things like this. But these people are so much happier. They, they keep coming back. We can’t stop. It’s one of their most popular programs because people love it.

Kelly [01:20:22]:
That’s great.

Christina Boyd [01:20:23]:
Yeah.

Kelly [01:20:23]:
I have one more question from an attendee and then I’ll let you talk more about your other programs. So this person explains that in the recent months they have developed a health condition that the damage has resulted in unfortunate sudden loss of series of body functions. They normally have been a relaxed person and have had full functioning, but has a strong body awareness of the losses, particularly at night when they’re getting ready for bed. They shared that they experience an adrenaline rush and extreme discomfort in the body like, like a distressed due to the helplessness. And in those moments they go from feeling relaxed to 9 out of 10 wired. And is there something that they could consider because it’s hard to even take half breaths in this super active state and take hours to fall asleep again. And then the person told me, yes, it’s the uvula. Sorry about that everyone.

Christina Boyd [01:21:27]:
Okay.

Kelly [01:21:29]:
Anyway, so. Well, let’s get back to the question. But yeah, that little thing hanging down, that’s the uvula. Okay.

Christina Boyd [01:21:35]:
Okay. All right. So to answer this question I do have on my website under resources, it says audio guide is only one. It’s called Nervous System Reset. It’s just my voice by 20 minutes, guiding you through some simple movements. It is designed to be done lying down. If you can lie down at night before you go to sleep, some people love it. And you can try that out. That’s one thing I can suggest. If this person were to choose to work with me. I can never promise that physical situations will change. However, what Brain Gym does is help remove that. The fight or flight, the adrenaline rush, the depression. It, it strengthens our inner self, which has many times given up hope and is stressed out by a physical situation. So if we can relax the nervous system, even though the body is uncomfortable, that is a big deal. And many people have experienced that. And I never know where that’s going to take them. So I do offer, and it’s an introductory package for chronic illness. They go to my website. It should be a pop up now on my website. And that’s a package that. To determine if it’s some. If this is something you want to commit to for a series of sessions. The introductory package consists of an online intake form where you fill it out on your own time. It’s a lot of personal questions about trauma you’ve experienced and your, your life, you know, growing up and that type of thing. The more information I have, the more of a blueprint I have of a person’s neural system. That’s what I’m looking at. So they fill that out and then they, they’re prompted to set a session, and then we have a session. This is virtual. I, I learned several years ago when I took that first virtual class of Brain Gym that this works virtually and I would say 50% of my practice is virtual now. So then after they fill that out, we have the first session and we dive right into Brain Gym. Generally, that sequence, I mean, not the movements, but setting the goal, noticing, doing the movements and then noticing again. And then they’ll receive an online feedback form, basically, what did you notice? And then I get that. And then we have the second session where we can have another experience, but then evaluate whether or not I feel or they feel or together we feel that this work might benefit them. It might be that. No. So I’ve designed this introductory package as a way to. Let’s see if this is something that I think is going to work. And I’ve worked with enough people now to have a pretty good idea. And I will be very honest. And if I feel that it might not be something that will really support them in their healing journey, I will say so. And they can still say, yeah, I want to try it anyway. But it gives them an opportunity to really evaluate before they say, okay, let’s do this. So that’s something to think about.

Kelly [01:25:29]:
Yes, that’s wonderful. And I’m really glad that you created that, that option for people with chronic illness and then maybe share a little bit more. So you offer classes in person. Telehealth.

Christina Boyd [01:25:44]:
Yeah, person.

Kelly [01:25:45]:
And then this offering for private sessions.

Christina Boyd [01:25:51]:
Yes. So I have the stand tall, don’t fall class, the in person class. Starting in August. We are entering our 10th year. I did not know when I started it if it would be popular or successful. And I can’t stop it. People like it. In 2020, I put it online and again, they like it. And it works online. And so this was originally for balance. It has evolved into helping people maintain or recharge their cognitive function, their physical balance, and their emotional balance. I keep it really inexpensive. Right now it’s like $9 a class because it’s designed to come weekly. If you want a weekly pickup, a weekly calming, a weekly rebalancing, refocusing, or just to feel good and to keep your brain active. Okay, you’re welcome. The first class is free. I mean, I made this class so easy. And if you really want to get benefit, come weekly. So I have it going in Flagstaff and I have it going online. You can both find them both on my website. The brain injury class is actually free to anybody anywhere with any kind of brain injury.

Kelly [01:27:12]:
Wow.

Christina Boyd [01:27:13]:
So that is through the Brain Injury association of Arizona. Again, you can find it on my website. Just go to the page it says about. About brain injury or for brain injury, and you fill out like an application. I don’t have anything to do with, you know, I just show up and teach. They do the registration, but everything. I mean, Parkinson’s, Covid, long haul, anything, like any birth defect that you were born with or any. Any kind of concussions. Anything. Concussions, any kind of compromised brain function. I see Michelle put my website in the chat. That’s great. And it is completely free. And we have 17 to 18 people every week. It’s a wonderful class. We have a lot of fun. And it. I was surprised. It really helps people sometimes regain function, like being able to walk without A walker.

Kelly [01:28:14]:
Yeah.

Christina Boyd [01:28:14]:
That’s really amazing. Yeah. So I offer that and the two stand tall classes. And then I just started a new class for those of you who are in Flagstaff. I know I talk to a lot of my people. It’s called dynamic movement. And what this is, it’s actually a session. I actually. And this is only 25, and it is in a group setting. I. I basically do an experience like I just took everybody through so they can have what we call a range imbalance in a group setting. And it’s offered through True North Integrative Osteopathic Institute. So it’s not at my office. And this is a new husband, wife, doctor team that’s opening this alternative center. So there’s that and then there’s the nervous system reset. And I do have some videos on my website, some sitting, some standing. They’re 17, 18, 15 minutes long. People can choose from that. So. And then the private sessions are. They are really in depth. And it’s the online intake. And then we really take the time and focus on those points of stress. It could be in the past, it could be present time. And then we choose the movements and then we do the movements. And in a private session, we don’t just move through a whole lot of them. We actually might do two, because the most important part of the session is accessing or stimulating or sort of focusing our attention on that point of stress, that neural system. And sometimes that might take half an hour and then we’ll do the movements. So that’s what a private session is. Very personalized.

Kelly [01:30:24]:
Right?

Christina Boyd [01:30:25]:
Yeah.

Kelly [01:30:26]:
This has been so wonderful. I so appreciate you. There’s one last question that I think would be fairly straightforward. Would physical balance classes be beneficial for only certain types of vertigo? And if so, which types?

Christina Boyd [01:30:41]:
Well, having experienced vertigo myself, I had what’s called positional vertigo. I think there’s another term for it, benign position. Benign, thank you. Yes, benign. And an osteopath helped me with that. The other one, what I consider vertigo, I think that’s the crystals in the ears that get misplaced or they don’t. They’re not fluid enough to get where they’re supposed to get, and I’ve had that too. And I did the Epley maneuver and that definitely helped. But I have worked with people who have had, like, dizziness and I, I don’t know what to suggest because if it is that physical, that the, the. Either the neck, mine was the neck, or the crystals, then these movements aren’t necessarily going to help. So I’M not sure of any other types of vertigo. Again, I’m not an expert in medical issues, but I would say for those two types that I’m aware of and I experienced both of them, I wouldn’t go to brain tune. You would need. The osteopath helped me with my neck because I have long, long standing neck injury. And the crystals, other than the Epilene maneuver, I’m not sure how it’s treated.

Kelly [01:32:11]:
Right. So I think the important thing is to work with your healthcare practitioner to figure out if there is a reversible type of vertigo or balance issues. And then, you know, if you’ve exhausted conventional medicine and then you’ve explored functional medicine and you’re still struggling, there, there may be some room for that. Just like the man who was able to move from walking with a walker to walking without any assistance. I think that there’s always an opportunity for healing and transformation at some level, and you just have to do your due diligence. As with every, with every condition, one.

Christina Boyd [01:32:57]:
Thing I can say is sometimes fear develops. Fear of it happening again, or fear of this and that we can definitely remove. I worked with a young mother who, she was pregnant with her second child and she had like a panic attack for the first time ever in her life. She didn’t know what it was associated with, and her naturopath referred her to me. Now, here’s a situation where we. We don’t know what triggered it, but she was terrified of having another panic attack. And so we just worked with the system. We trust the system. And I think she had three sessions and she said, I just don’t have that fear anymore. I. And I haven’t seen her again. So fear of something, fear that develops. That’s what I call like either an emotional overlay to an injury or just that emotional response that gets set in a panic attack. It was apparently pretty intense. And then, yes, she was afraid of having it again. That we can help with range. Yes.

Kelly [01:34:16]:
This has been so much fun. I know that the people who have participated really enjoyed it. I love the feedback, feedback from everybody and how much more calm and connected they felt. And you’re just a wonderful teacher and I hope that the folks who have benefited take a look at your classes, take a look at your offering, and share this with your friends and family. So thank you so much for participating. Just a little, a little advertisement for our next webinar. It is with a nurse named Trina Fell Felber. And it’s what’s secretly making you sick. And sabotaging your beauty. So very different topic. More about healthy skin care and environmental chemical exposures and a lot of our beauty products. So certainly an important topic to be aware of. That will be on Friday, July 11th at 1:00pm and of course, we will always send the replay. And we will send the replay for this. Christina, thank you again and thank you, Michelle, for being our helper in the chat behind the scenes. And thank you everyone for participating and we’ll see you next time.

Christina Boyd [01:35:40]:
Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this and thanks everybody for coming.

Chat transcript:

It was such a pleasure to host Dr. Lyn Patrick and Dr. Louise Tolzmann on our latest webinar. We explored the rising health risks of wildfire and building smoke exposure, including the long-range travel of toxic particles and gases. Dr. Patrick and Dr. Tolzmann explained how to monitor outdoor and indoor air quality effectively, why proper air filtration (like Austin Air purifiers) is critical, and the most effective home cleaning strategies after fire or smoke events. The speakers emphasized the underestimated dangers of invisible pollutants, the health conditions linked to smoke exposure (including respiratory, cardiovascular, and cancer risks), and emerging concerns like airborne fungi and heavy metal contamination. They also discussed proactive supplements like NAC, B vitamins, and green tea to protect the body during and after exposure. This webinar was jam-packed with practical, actionable steps for both healthcare providers and the general public to better prepare for and recover from future wildfire events.

Special thanks for our webinar sponsor Austin Air. Enjoy 10% off their amazing purifiers using code DRKELLY.

To learn more from Lyn Patrick, ND, be sure to visit her at EMEI Global and check out her course called “How to Survive in a Toxic World and Prevent Disease” here.

Click here to learn more from Louise Tolzmann.

Recommended handouts:

• Leave it at the Door: A Guide to Reducing Contaminants in Your Home
• NAEM Wildfire Resources for Patients and Clinicians found here

Recommended products from the conversation with Dr. Patrick and Dr. Tolzmann:

• TRI-FORTIFY® LIPOSOMAL GLUTATHIONE TRAVEL PACKETS
• Tri-Fortify® Liposomal Glutathione
• Readisorb Go Glutathione
• NAC

As always, for those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:02]:
Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m very excited to hang out and learn from my friends and colleagues, Drs. Lynn Patrick and Dr. Louise Toltzman. They are experts in environmental medicine and today our topic is wildfire, Wild smoke and what we can do about it to preserve our health and take care of our families. So super important topic today for any who lives on the planet, but especially in the Western United States where wildfires are a constant problem throughout the year. And it’s been more and more so, especially in my area of the woods in Southern California with all the fires in the Los Angeles area. So we’re going to get into that and get into the science and so that you can understand how to protect yourselves and be prepared for the next time because there will be a next time. Unfortunately, if you want to drop your information in the chat, we’d love to hear where people are coming from and what brought you here. I love that part of this. It’s always so exciting to see where people are coming from in the world. Okay, just a few items of housekeeping. We will send out the replay sometime next week along with the transcript. So if you have to drop off, we’ll miss you, but you’ll be able to watch it all next week. Additionally, those of you who are here, your emails will be entered into a raffle to potentially win an Austin Air HealthMate plus, which is super, super exciting. It’s one of the top of the line air filters and we will definitely be talking about this today. We’re so grateful to Austin Air for sponsoring this webinar and being so generous with with our community. O Dr. Tolstman is a licensed naturopath. She’s been practicing in Oregon since 2005. She completed her training in environmental medicine with Dr. Walter Crinian. She’s a fellow of ICI, the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, and on the Executive Board of naem, the national association of Environmental Medicine. Holds degrees from Simon Fraser University in Canada, Ambassador University, where she got her naturopathic degree. She’s lectured on air quality, smoke exposure, wildfire risks and toxic metals. She’s also produced video resources for fire departments to utilize in training of their first responders and works with firefighters individually. She has a private practice in Portland, Oregon, where she specializes in environmental medicine and oncology. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Tolstman.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:03:02]:
Yes, of course.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:03:03]:
Thank you and Dr. Patrick, my friend, mentor and colleague. She graduated from Bastyr University in 84 with a doctorate in naturopathic medicine and has been in private practice for 39 years in Arizona and Colorado. She’s a published author of numerous articles and peer reviewed medical journals, past contributing editor to Alternative Medicine Review, and recently authored a chapter in the textbook In Clinical and Environmental Medicine. It’s a big tome that all doctors should be required to read. She’s also contributed to Dr. Nathan’s newly released book the Sensitive Patients Healing Guide. And she speaks internationally on environmental medicine, fatty liver disease, endocrine disruption, metal toxicology and other topics. She’s on faculty at Metabolic Medicine Medicine Institute with a 4M and the George Washington School of Medicine. She’s the past president of NAEM and she’s on the board now of the American association of Environmental Medicine with yours truly. So happy to have her. And she also continues to educate healthcare providers in environmental medicine through EMEI Global Platform and their Review podcast. And in her spare time, if she has any, she likes picking fruit in her orchard, biking, hiking, kayaking, and enjoying the pleasures of Southwestern Colorado. Oh my goodness, that was long.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:04:46]:
Hey, can I add one more current and relevant thing?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:04:49]:
Absolutely, please.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:04:50]:
This week, in conjunction with Austin Air, Dr. Ann Marie Fine and I recorded a three webinar series called the Invisible Enemies in which we talk about. And this is for the public. This is not for doctors, only for the public, in which we talk about what is inside indoor air. In your home. In all of our homes. Right, right. What we can do about it, but most importantly how it affects the immune system. This is not information that you’re going to read about in your blogs online. You can’t do a Google search for it unless you’re really, really good. But it’s critical for all of us to understand this stuff. So it’s free. Go to the YouTube channel for Austin Air and just search for Invisible Enemies and you’ll see the three part webinar. It’s already uploaded, so you can take a look at that. We will be discussing some of those toxicants today and I’m sure Michelle will.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:05:50]:
Find that link and plop it in the chat so you can use that link when she discovers it. And put that. And bookmark it so you can watch it later.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:06:03]:
There it is.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:06:04]:
There it is. She’s so good. Okay, thank you, Michelle. All right, so, you know, before we dive in really deep to the nitty gritty, I, I kind of want to set the stage because growing up, even though I was on the East Coast, I didn’t hear about wildfires. They weren’t really happening at the level that they’re happening now. So what’s happened? What’s changed? Why are there so many fires every year?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:06:35]:
I’ll hand that off to Dr. Toman and then maybe I’ll add a psychological.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:06:42]:
I think it’s a combination of a lot of things, but I think we have to look at global warming as a big piece of it. I mean, overall temperatures are rising. We tend to have more drought conditions. Everything is drier. The interface between where we live and where nature is has gotten a lot closer. We want to have houses in the middle of the woods and we want to kind of be out there. And so places that maybe would have burned and not actually impacted us are now impacting us. We have less buffer. I think it’s hotter and drier and everything is burning more rapidly because of that.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:07:23]:
So my little PS is just forest management practices have changed. And instead of allowing both using fires, setting fires to clean out the forest floor, we have accumulated a lot of forest floor. I live in southwest Colorado where there’s a lot of forest floor and naturally burning cycles will clean out the forest floor. That has not happened. So we’ve got extra fuel. That’s not to negate climate change or anything. It’s just a fact.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:08:01]:
Yeah. So lots of things contributing to the increase in wildfires, which means we’re going to have to keep dealing with them. And so the other thing that I found really interesting that I think is important too, for those of you who may not be in the western United States who are directly impacted. The wildfire and the smoke can travel great, great distances. And so people are being affected, their health is being affected. So maybe let’s start looking at those people to remind them why this is important for them to pay attention also.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:08:40]:
Absolutely. You know, Kelly, it’s interesting, in our training, you and I and Louise, when we were trained, we learned about a study where they actually radio labeled pesticides in Africa. Do you remember that?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:08:52]:
Yes.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:08:53]:
And these pesticides ended up on the coast of Florida on the ground, in the soil and in the air. And we have two air plumes, one called the Beijing plume and one called the Mongolian plume, that come over from China, that bring a significant amount of mercury. And that is pertinent to our discussion today about wildfires because we have mercury in the air as a result of those. Those plumes dropping mercury onto our soil and onto our trees. So there are no invisible barriers between countries, between states, between continents that prevent wildfire, smoke or any other airborne pollutant from traveling all over the globe.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:09:41]:
Yeah. And I will add to that as that it’s very easy to be lulled into a sense of safety when you look outside and the air looks clean. And I think that’s part of what happens is the heavier, bigger particles, the ones that make the air look sooty and smoky, they’re usually closer to the fire. But the gas. Gases can travel miles and hundreds of miles, and those gases are not visible. You may not notice it at all outside. And if you aren’t routinely kind of checking air quality, you are walking outside, being exposed without actually even knowing it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:18]:
Right. So maybe let’s start there. What would be a good practice in general, whether you’re in fire season, you’re not. You don’t happen to live in an area that’s heavily wood. What are some ways that we can monitor our air, both indoor and outdoor? But we’ll start with outdoor. We’ll move inside.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:10:43]:
So I was just thinking about that this morning. I don’t know. You can’t. You can see my phone. It’s on the weather. And I can pull up the air quality index, which is also available through airnow.gov that’s the air quality index as calculated by the EPA and is available as per your zip code. Mine comes up right on my phone. Right now, it’s 37, which is good. Anything under 50 is considered good, and it’s designated by a green bar. Right now, there are increments of increase in air quality index that go from yellow to orange to red. And I think there’s even a purple one now.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:11:29]:
300 is purple. Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:11:31]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:11:32]:
And purple, you’re suffocating.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:11:36]:
Purple is an emergency that you have to seal. You have to shelter in place and seal off your house. So we have seen those levels of air quality. Dr. Tolzman saw them during the fires of 2017. I think 20.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:11:51]:
20. 2020. In the. In September of 2020, when they’re. The whole west coast and it went up into Canada and it. I mean, we broke EPA records. It. It was crazy. Yeah. In the 400s and the 450s.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:12:04]:
Oh, my goodness.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:12:05]:
But I think where there is some wiggle room or disagreement, I’m going to say is that yellow zone between 50 and 100. Right. That’s considered okay. Unless you’re a sensitive person. And a sensitive person is defined as somebody with asthma, copd, et cetera. And I don’t know. Luis, tell us what you think about this. But I think good air quality as defined by the World Health organization is under 50, not between 50 and 100.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:12:39]:
Agreed. Agreed. And I actually think we shouldn’t be outside exercising when it’s above 50. And I can tell you that right now, according to my air quality, it is above 50 in Portland. So it looks fine. The clear sky day does not look smoky and it’s running between 50 and 65. And I’m on purple air. And part of what I like about Purple arrow and I think we can talk further about purple air and the differences between that is you can kind of get a big picture of it. So this is a lot of individual sensors. People have individual sensors. So instead of getting stuck on like one sensor or the one closest to your home, just get a big picture sense. Is there something happening somewhere? Is there a fire? How is it moving? Is it moving towards you? Is it moving away from you? Is. Are you just in a little pocket and everything around you is green or you know, you can kind of get a feel of what’s happening. And sometimes you can get a feel like your air looks good but you can see it’s coming. And so I tend to go there and I try to go there once a day like I’m. And if it’s funky like today where it’s in the 50s, I would probably check it more frequently. Right. Like before I leave, I’ll probably be like, huh, what’s it doing? Just so that I’m a little bit more thoughtful about what how I’m interacting when I’m outside. And so my, my cutoff is kind of above 50. I feel like we shouldn’t be breathing deeply above a hundred. I’m. No, I’m respirator.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:14:10]:
You’re wearing a full on respirator?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:14:12]:
Yes, and I brought one for show and tell.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:14:14]:
Oh perfect. Great, great.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:14:16]:
So we’re not talking about an N95 mask or a KN. We are talking about a full on respirator. Can’t wait to.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:14:24]:
I know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:14:25]:
Demonstrate.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:14:27]:
It’s a full on respirator.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:14:31]:
You can buy these exact one I.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:14:33]:
Have, they’re less than. They’re less than $30. You can buy. I have a whole bin. I mean this is part of my preparedness is I have a smoke bin. I have a bunch of these in different sizes. I have ones for every member of my family and then obviously a few extra. We have filters that are these which are the P100. So not N95. Right. But 100% of the PM 2.5. So P1 hundreds plus a gas. It’s a multi gas and vapor cartridge. And I just have extras of these and then I have these and then when It’s. And it looks like this before it’s attached. Right, Right. So it just looks like this. And you can put different cartridges on it. It has a whole bunch of silicone to try to make it kind of comfortable, but they definitely start to kind of bug the bridge of your nose if you’re wearing it for long periods of time. But I will tend to wear it. You know, if it’s above 100, I’m wearing it when I’m walking the dog. And I can tell you it’s. It’s hard to do. People look at you really funny. They cross the street. They, you know.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:15:44]:
But it.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:15:44]:
But it is. It’s one of those things where it’s like, I. I don’t want my lungs. I don’t want that in my lungs.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:15:52]:
Yeah. And. And I think, too, Louise, this leads. If I may, Leads to that. Back to that discussion of what’s a sensitive group. I don’t have asthma per se, but I’ve been occupationally exposed to formaldehyde.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:16:10]:
Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:16:10]:
And my lungs get irritated very easily when air levels of solvents are higher. Right. And I. I kind of know what to look for. Right. Because I’m in this business. Right. So I think that there’s a. There is a broader definition of who’s a sensitive individual. Not just, but definitely including kids who have asthma who need to use inhalers, older folks who have copd. And COPD is getting diagnosed. You might be able to comment on this, Kelly, in younger and younger people, for reasons that are not very clear to all of us, but probably have to do with air quality.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:16:50]:
I’m sure it does. And I don’t even know if they’re adequately getting diagnosed, to be honest with you, because most practitioners don’t think, oh, you’re short of breath, maybe you’re overweight, you’re not exercising, you’re sitting in your seat all the time. I’m not going to bother to get pulmonary function tests or even a CT scan. And then, as somebody just commented in the chat. Yeah, vaping is a huge, huge problem.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:17:20]:
Unbelievably toxic. Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:17:23]:
Yeah. We could do a whole segment on that. And it’s the chemicals in the. The cartridge that’s so bad. Anyway, don’t want to digress too far. So, yeah, huge problem. So Louise has her respirator. I feel badly for the animals who don’t have their respirators.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:17:50]:
I know. And I think, you know, so I. So above 50, I’m limiting my exercise outside. Right. I’m not Exercising outside. And when it’s above 100, I’m wearing a respirator when I’m outside. And I’m trying to have my indoor air be okay. So I’m working hard on trying to have a space that is safe because I think, you know, that conversation, Lynn, about who’s a sensitive group. You know, as we have more and more smoke days and fire days and things like that, we are all becoming sensitive groups, right? Like we’re having more and more exposure. So the first thing is how can I limit my exposure? How can I reduce my exposure? And for me to put on a respirator when I’m walking the dog is just one little thing. But it’s like at least that 20 minute walk now has a lot less. I’ve got a lot less stuff in my lungs, right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:18:42]:
And you know, from my perspective, taking care of mast cell patients, all of my mast cell patients are very, very sensitive. And they don’t necessarily have respiratory issues in that, they don’t necessarily have asthma, but their level of sensitivity is great. And we mastles in our lungs. And so that’s a, a huge issue for mastle patients. And with the increases in environmental chemicals Covid I think we’re getting increased numbers of mast cell patients who are sensitive. Oh, and all the mold sensitizes people to other airborne toxicants as well.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:19:22]:
And you know, we probably should just fit this in here. Now that we’re on this subject, there are some good papers that are coming out on the air biome. This is a new field of science, the myco air biome, where scientists are finding that there are actually organisms that are carried by wildfire smoke. And coccidiomycosis is one of them. So this is a fungi, lives in the dirt in southern California, not necessarily in the LA area, but in the death of southern California. And I used to practice in Tucson. We are like ground zero for valley fever. So there is probably more risk than there has been historically. And that’s kind of borne out by increasing diagnoses of valley fever. Whether it’s because of fires or not, we don’t know. But there are scientists that are now publishing studies looking at these organisms that are not necessarily killed by the smoke, but they are carried by the smoke and they are more available. So, you know, we’re not doing this webinar because we want people to become paranoid of breathing the air. We just want providers and informed healthcare consumers to know that if you’ve got a chronic cough and you’ve been in a wildfire or you’ve been exposed to wildfire smoke. There are more things that may be going on than just, oh, you got some irritation here. You know, here’s a steroid inhaler and go home and be happy that you really need to be much more proactive. And for the providers listening, you need to really consider these differential diagnoses.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:21:10]:
Right. And the onset can really look like a mild virus. I mean, it can progress into a pneumonia. And there’s been, you know, so much respiratory stuff. Right. Because it’s winter. But it, but it’s not contagious to other people. You’ve inhaled this and it’s, you know, and it needs to be tested for. And I think, I think clinicians aren’t necessarily thinking of that. Right. I mean, people are coming in with these symptoms where you’re kind of trying to rule out pneumonia, bacterial, viral pneumonia, you’re trying to rule out influenza or something else like that instead of. And it’s not maybe on someone’s radar, but, but it should be on all of our radars. And especially with all of these fires. I think it’s, it’s. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:21:52]:
So let’s just recap before we move on in terms of giving people tools to assess their outdoor air. There’s airnow.gov, right?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:22:06]:
Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:22:07]:
And then Purple Air is a website that you can access. You can actually purchase your own meter if you want to have own purple air meter and contribute to the database. There’s something called Atmo Pro which you can like hook to your backpack and it links to your phone as well as what’s on the weather app on your phone. Any other resources that, that people could take advantage of.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:22:37]:
Well, this is very specific to your geographic area, but I think so important. We were talking about this right before we went live. There is a data scientist at the University of California in San Diego, I think, who is crowdsourced. Well, it can’t be because she lives in, in the Eaton fire area, so it must be ucla. She’s crowdsourcing data. She’s been on the CBS News, she’s been in the Associated Press, the. I have the website up, so let me just see if. Excuse me, I can pull it up right now. But what she is finding is she’s getting individuals whose homes are still standing. They haven’t, maybe they’ve been partially damaged to test their floor and window sills for metals. Right. So not just lead, but lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury. And so far I think there are about 226 homes. Yes. That have been Tested for metals. And just for context, the EPA allowable level for lead on a floor is about 10 micrograms per square foot to 40 micrograms per square foot. And we have levels in these homes as high as 1200 micrograms per square foot. Very high levels of lead. Now we breathe lead in. That is the main way we as non occupationally exposed humans are exposed to lead is airborne lead. It’s very easily transferred, especially if you think about how hot fire smoke is and how it breaks down big particles into little tiny nanoparticles and that includes the metals, how easily that lead can then go into your entire circulatory system. So this is a public health issue and Dr. Tolzman and I were talking about this yesterday that we want to advocate for people in this area a to test, get your floors and test your window sills for particulate, meaning dust lead. That’s a very important and very easy and cheap thing to do.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:04]:
And how would they do that?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:25:06]:
So the best resource I know for all things lead is a woman who has a website called Lead Safe Mama. She’s, I think this one’s actually gotten like the Presidential Medal of Honor for her public health research. Her, she had two children who are acutely lead exposed and permanently poisoned as a result of a home renovation. And that kind of allowed her to both have this website, but also to advocate for testing. Now she has done the latest research on the best lead stick test. So it’s actually a swab that you can get I think at most big boxes, hardware stores, you know, home improvement stores. And, and so it’s very easy to do. Now let’s just talk about those people who were in those homes who had both windowsill and floor lead in the thousands of micrograms. The New York Times did an investigative study right after the fire where they went, they went, took an industrial hygienist’s van in and they did all these air measurements and found air lead 100 times higher than the baseline pre fire levels. Right. So we know that lead is a problem.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:26:27]:
Right. Wow.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:26:29]:
Want to advocate for people in the immediate areas of the fire because that’s the crowdsourcing was the Eaton fire specifically to test for lead. And then if those levels are higher than the EPA allowable levels, which VPA allowable levels for window sills are a little bit higher. They’re up to 100 micrograms per square foot. I don’t know why I think that’s. Isn’t that weird? Window sills get to have, you know, Three times higher levels or ten times higher levels than floors. That doesn’t mean.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:27:11]:
Don’t you think that that’s paint as opposed to dust?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:27:14]:
I think so. I think it is. So I would stick with that. Lower level.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:27:19]:
Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:27:19]:
Floors of 5 to 10 micrograms per square foot. So if you’ve got higher levels than that on your floor, we’re going to talk a lot about what to do in your home because a lot of people are sitting there going, oh my gosh, I’m breathing this stuff. What am I going to do? But the other thing is to have your blood lead levels tested. This is something we do routinely. Medicare requires it for children, you know, age of two. We don’t do that for adults, I think, because we are blind, deaf and dumb to current lead exposure risk in the United States of America. But I think this is just one more reason that we just need to start doing it. And so functional medicine providers like yourself, Dr. McCann, need to be aware of this and need to know if they’re in a geographic area where there have been a lot of house fires. We’re now talking about house fires versus forest fires. But this is something that absolutely needs to happen. We need to advocate for our patients to test their, you know, windowsills and their floors. Why not? It’s cheap and easy to do. And then to create some actionable algorithms from that. Right. Especially for pregnant women who are at high risk for poor outcomes with their developing children.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:45]:
Absolutely.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:28:46]:
And for young children who are at much higher risk for development, for neurological damage than our adults in the same environment. Right, right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:28:58]:
And we know that there’s no safe level of lead in the blood. And corre. If you’re a practitioner and you’re listening or a patient requesting, you want whole blood lead levels, not serum blood levels. And if it’s above one, it’s a problem. Yeah, it’s a lot of. It’s a much bigger problem.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:29:23]:
Speaking of problems, a lot of the labs will begin their limits of detection, sadly, at 3.5, which is way too high.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:29:33]:
Right. I think Quest does less than 1. So 1 is their limit of detection, thankfully. So that would be the one that I would recommend, if you have a choice. But yeah, super easy to do at this point because in Southern California, when I’m checking people, most people, if they are postmenopausal or post andropausal, they’ll start to have elevated levels of lead in the blood. Not too high one, two, usually if. Because they’re losing the lead from the bone.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:30:05]:
Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:05]:
It’s not necessarily coming from the air. But the only other people that I see higher lead levels in, at least without forest fires, are people who are gun enthusiasts or policemen because they’re exposed to a lot more lead with the casings. So certainly serial lead levels would be important too, after an event. Okay, so lead safe, Mama. I think somebody was asking about the site to look up about lead. Lead safe is the.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:30:41]:
The state often has ways to test water. I’m not sure about dust. I think you can send paint chips and I think you can send water to the state of California. I think they have a lead program, usually have a lead program. But dust, I think would be a different sample. And it would be nice if you could do other metals as well and not just kind of that because we are seeing increased arsenic and we are seeing increased cadmium and some other metals in the dust.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:09]:
Right. Because there’s certainly other metals in the smoke and other metals that we’re getting exposed to.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:31:15]:
Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:31:17]:
As well as Dr. Tolsman and I have talked about this in other webinars. Think of the soot particle, we call it particulate matter, as a little ball surrounded by Velcro. And whatever is floating around in the air will stick to that particulate matter and be carried far away. So we have pesticides, solvents, which we talk a lot about in the Austin air Invisible enemies webinar. We have bisphenols like bpa, which we know is not good for us. We have microplastics in wildfire smoke, sadly. What am I missing, Luis?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:32:00]:
I feel like I’m not lame retardants. I mean, there’s all the metals. There’s cadmium, lead, arsenic, all sorts of metals. Mercury. We’ve got asbestos. We’ve got formaldehyde, which sometimes we classify as a solvent and sometimes not. We’ve got the benzene, the toluene, the other solvents that are just kind of gases. It’s basically you take a step back and say, what burned? Right? And what has burned is everything in your home or in somebody’s home nearby, Right. So all the plastic watering system, plastic, vinyl, windows, computer systems, furniture, that’s all processed with flame retardants. Right. And then pressure treated lumber, you know, older lumber has asbestos in it, has chromium in it. Right. Like or not asbestos, but arsenic, arsenic and chromium in it. Homes with our. With asbestos are going to burn and all of that stuff gets liberated and depending on what kind of combustion there was. Right. So if you think about a campfire, you’ve got it. When it’s going really hot, it’s coming off as smoke. When it’s first starting, there’s these chunks that are kind of coming out and flakes. And so it’s like partially burned asbestos, partially burned plastics that are kind of going up into the air in addition to just the straight up gases. And we measure, we talk about things like we talk about PM 2.5. Right. But what is PM 2.5? It’s just a particle that is a size 2.5. We have PM 10s and we have, you know, smaller than PM2.5. We’ve got the microparticles. But what these are is actually these substances we just talked about. So it’s, it’s this conglomeration of a chunk of plastic. It’s a bit of formaldehyde, it’s a, you know, a bit of asbestos. And that’s what we’re breathing. When we’re looking at what is PM2.5. There was a study actually it’s going on across the country. But there happened, there’s 12 sites that they launched in May of 2024 to try to look at what’s in the 2.5s. So they’ve got these air monitors and they happen to have one south of the fires. And so they were able to see what happened as the fire smoke started to arrive. And that’s where they saw 110 fold increase in lead. And this was not just. This was PM2.5 lead. So the PM2.5 is elevated, but this is a lead that’s attached to this PM2.5. Right. So they also saw higher formaldehyde, nitrogen dioxide. So a bunch of different gases which we know it smells, it burns your throat, your eyes sting, you get a headache like it, it doesn’t feel well to, to breathe in smoke. And this is part of it.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:34:54]:
So yeah, Dr. McCarter just very importantly noted dioxin, which is a product of combustion of paper or plastic, like polyvinyl chloride, like East Palestine, Ohio. The vinyl chloride that burned turned into dioxin. And dioxin is a very toxic substance that we do not want to ingest or inhale at all. We want to avoid it like the plague. So that there is dioxin in wildfire smoke. Right, Right. Because we burn up our plastic houses.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:35:36]:
So for those listeners who may not have as much experience with what are some of these toxins doing to our bodies, what are some of the downstream consequences of having all of these chemical exposures, whether it’s an acute fire or from smoke, because you live further away. Can you just talk about what are some of the medical conditions that people have linked to fire exposure?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:36:08]:
Well, I’ll start by saying cancer. I mean, we can start talking about all the different cardiovascular links and all the different respiratory links. But we know from firefighter data, Right. We know that it in as of 2023, it is the leading cause of death in firefighters is cancer. And this is because of their exposures. And they are getting acute exposures more frequently, obviously, than all of us, but they’re often on air, and they’re doing a whole bunch of things to try to mitigate those exposures, which we don’t have access to in a wildfire. We don’t have access to oxygen tanks or things like that that necessarily. Maybe some people do, but most of us don’t. Right, but they do. And certainly the first big study kind of came out in 2006, and it was in the meta analysis of 32 other studies that basically showed higher multiple myeloma, higher lymphoma, higher prostate cancer, higher testicular cancer. That then got another released in 2019, where they were looking at 49 different studies. And now they added bladder cancer, brain cancer, colorectal cancer, melanoma, breast cancer. So we know that there are just higher risks to this particular population. And when we think of firefighters, we think of a group that is usually a little healthier than the mainstream demographic, at least physically. Right, right. They’re stronger, they’re exercising, certainly they’re often running 24 hour shifts, which we know circadian rhythm. That’s a problem. And food may be different in different places, but in general, you have a population that tends to be healthier. So seeing kind of cancers in younger people, it’s linked to the exposures. And part of it is the problem that we study all of these chemicals individually in these little vacuums. Right. Like, what does lead do? And what does this thing, formaldehyde do? And we don’t talk about what happens if we’re gonna throw this entire big soup at you and you’re gonna be walking around breathing all of that.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:38:26]:
Yeah. You know, the EPA has started to do these kind of aggregate studies where they’re looking at combinations of exposures. And the one truth that’s emerging is 1. 1 equals 100.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:38:39]:
Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:38:40]:
Not 2. And that the summation of all of these exposures, there’s not just an additive effect. It’s logarithmic. Like, it’s really one plus one equals 100. And so that’s, you know, it. Again, not to create undue concern. But the World Health Organization has now identified that 99% of the human population lives in an area where air quality is considered unhealthy. I have no idea where the 1% is. I would love to know. It’s probably out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. So we have to take this seriously. That’s the bottom line. And certainly indoor air, as the EPA has admitted and done studies on, is more polluted than outdoor air. And so we have to recognize that and do whatever’s necessary to remediate that and keep our indoor air safe. And the biggest challenge is for people who have been in these events. So let’s just take LA county and the LA wildfires, right? Louise and I were talking about this amazing study. Kelly, I don’t know if you read this, but it was a study done by some environmental technologists out of University of California San Diego and California Colorado State University in my state. And what they did is they simulated a wildfire, blew it into a house, and then they went in and in immaculate detail, they figured out what was in the indoor air of the house. Not just what was in the air, but what was in the ceiling, the walls, the floor and all the horizontal surfaces.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:40:33]:
Wow.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:40:34]:
It was a lot. And then I just reread the study this morning. It’s a mind blowing study and we’ll share it with you. It’s kind of technical, but the takeaways are amazing. They then figured out what happened to all those adsorbed. It’s just a word that means kind of clinging to instead of going inside. Right. All those adso absorbed volatile organic compounds, so gases. What happened to them if they just opened the windows and the doors? So they tried that. Then they blew some more smoke in. Then they kept the windows and doors closed and they turned on air filters and they had really high end, high quality air filters. And then the third thing they tried was cleaning the walls with standard. You know, it wasn’t organic cleaner, it was something with a fragrance and they didn’t even say the trade name, so I couldn’t tell you, but it was like something you could go buy at Safeway or something.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:41:35]:
Right?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:41:36]:
They cleaned the walls, the floors and the, and the horizontal surfaces. And what they found is that that last intervention cut down the levels of continuously emitted gases from the walls and the floors and you know, the ceilings by 40%. Guess how much the air cleaners and the ventilation did? 4%.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:42:04]:
Wow. I was gonna say 20. Oh my God.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:42:08]:
Yeah, this was mind blowing for me. Right? Because I always am advocating, you know, and I still advocate, you know, please get an indoor air filtration device.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:42:19]:
Yes, right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:42:22]:
And keep it. Excuse me, keep it on 24 7. Because as they, what they found was that as soon as you turn that air filtration device off or you shut the windows and the doors, the airborne levels of VOCs that we’re breathing in that are coming from the walls, the ceilings and the floors went back to normal within a few hours. But if you clean, then you literally are getting rid of 43% of the airborne emissions. So I guess, you know, the takeaway from that study is elbow grease, baby. You know, we just have to learn how to. We have to remediate with friction. You know, that’s kind of what I. My take home was. And our dear friend and colleague, Dr. Joe Carnahan. Remember that crazy fire that went through outside Boulder on New year’s day in 2023? Yeah, that fire. So it literally burned down 200 homes across the street from her clinic. She had all of her air filtration devices going. You know, she had like five IQ or Austin Air, you know, high end air filtration devices going 24 7. And her clinic was actually a refuge for people to come in who were having problems with shortness of breath and eye irritation and everything, because there were 200 homes that were flambed. But she brought in an industrial hygienist who abs, who said, you have got to bring in a cleaning crew and you’ve got to scrub the walls, you’ve got to actually clean the ceiling, you’ve got to clean the floors and all the horizontal surfaces. And so they did that and they reduced their indoor air contamination by some. I don’t remember the percentage, but it was a significant percentage. So I think for those folks who are in LA right now, it would be really helpful to improve indoor air quality to be able to clean, wet mop, wet dust, all of that. You know, that’s what, that’s what they did in the study was they wet mopped, they vacuumed. Oh, that’s another thing we have to talk about is vacuuming.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:44:49]:
Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:44:50]:
Do you want to explain the vacuuming conundrum?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:44:53]:
Yes. I mean, the vacuuming conundrum is that you’re stirring things up. As soon as you start to vacuum, you’re stirring things up. And so you want a vacuum that is, is tight, meaning that there’s good seals around the filter and you want a HEPA filter and a lot of vacuums. You can buy a HEPA filter for and you can put a HEPA filter on in order to have it be that way. But you will still, even with a HEPA filter, you’re still going to stir things up because obviously, as it’s blowing out, the dust that’s on your countertop or windowsill is now going to be airborne. So that’s why you’re going to wear your respirator. You’re going to vacuum first and then you’re going to clean. And, you know, like Lynn said, it’s just elbow grease. There’s nothing fancy. It’s. No, don’t buy fancy cleaners or chemicals or things with smell in them or anything like that. It’s literally you’re trying to wipe the dust off that has kind of clung to the walls and clung to the ceiling and get rid of that.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:45:59]:
One fancy thing. There are two fancy things I can recommend because they were recommended to me by John Banta, who’s one of our indoor air environment professionals. And one of them is, is a natural rubber latex sponge called absorbing. I think it’s like, I got mine for like, I think like $8, and you literally use it dry. And it has been shown to absorb tremendous amounts of particulate matter. So you’re literally just sweeping it across the surface and it just kind of absorbs a bunch of stuff. And the other thing is, he recommends microfiber cloths. So there’s a microfiber mop you can get without any chemicals on it. And just microfiber cloths, they will absorb more particulate matter, you know, if you’re, if you’re dusting with them.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:46:54]:
So put your respirator on, vacuum everything with your HEPA vacuum and your good tight seals. And then would you use the adsorbine first? Would you wet wipe things?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:47:11]:
The absorbing is for remediation, specifically for mold, mold exposure and for smoke removal. So it’s, it’s actually made for those two things.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:47:26]:
Okay.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:47:26]:
So you just use it dry. You don’t wet it. It’s, it’s. The directions are from the iep. Don’t get it wet. It doesn’t work as well. And I, I think you can only use it for one. Like, you can’t use it over and over and over again. Right. You’ve got to get a new one if you’re going to do a new remediation.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:47:46]:
Okay. So I’m just trying to think about this in terms of process for people. They really, you know, I probably have patients who need to do this. So you do the absorbing, or you could do the microfiber. Would you wet wipe things or where.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:48:03]:
Would you put wet wiping? We know from studies, because this is what is recommended by the EPA for lead wet exposure. Wet wiping works much better than dry dusting. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:16]:
Because you kind of have to do it multiple times. You have to vacuum it, you might have to dry wipe it, you might have to wet wipe it. And if you’re only getting maybe 40%, you probably have to do it again. Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:48:28]:
Well, it’s interesting because this particular group of engineers that did the study did it for a reason. They knew that this was a huge problem and that these chemicals would keep evaporating out of the walls and the ceilings and the floors for, they said, years after a smoke event. So, yes, absolutely. You have to keep doing it. Okay, yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:57]:
Any idea on the timing of it? Is it something that you would do, like once a week for a certain amount of time to try and really lower the burden? We have no idea.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:49:09]:
We have no idea. And some of this depends on how, you know, how close to the fire was your home, how much ash and dust do you have in your home, what’s happening outside, you know, because we’re talking about opening the windows when the air is good outside. But if you have a little gust of air, all of the ash that has settled around your home is now coming back into your home. Right. So are you recontaminating when you. So, you know, wiping down things outside, hosing things down outside, hosing down driveways, hosing down the ground, maybe putting mulch on top of garden beds to try to kind of contain the ash and stuff that is outside of your home and being really mindful about what you’re. How you’re coming into your home. We were talking yesterday, Lynn, about the mats. Do you want to talk about the mats? Yeah, I will.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:49:59]:
This is a really good handout for you, Kelly, to give patients patients. It’s from the Georgia Public Health Department, which we can send to you. So they just happen to be the public health department that was good at educating people about this. But this is EPA data that rec what the EPA recommends in order to cut, and they’re focusing on indoor pesticide levels. But a lot of other things come into your home on your shoes and your animals paws is to have a wiping mat outside and then a very specific absorbent mat on the inside of the front door or back door and then a third mat that matches up with that. And this particular handout, which I know, Louise, you sent it to me. Maybe we can send it to Kelly and she can post it. These are very specific materials that are adsorbent probably. Right. That attract these particles. And the EPA data on this was that it cut indoor dust and air pesticides by 50%, which is huge. Right, right. It just shows us how much we’re tracking in from lawns and parks and gardens and the forest and shoes off.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:51:17]:
So then. Shoes off.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:51:18]:
Yeah. The EPA absolutely is clear about this. You can wipe your shoes, but then you take them off.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:51:26]:
Right, right. Yeah. I had a patient recently whose glyphosate level was sky high, you know, greater than 95th percentile. And she’s well known in the health space as organic, all of those sorts of things. And she was just mortified, like, where the heck is this coming from? And she had done this study a couple years prior when she lived in LA and it was normal. And then she moved to Boulder and it was sky high. And she’s like, what is happening? And I said, do you have dogs? Do your dogs get on your couch and in your bed? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. The poor little doggies with glyphosate on their feet.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:52:12]:
Well, so this is good for them too. Right? This is a remediation strategy for our animals. We don’t want them absorbing that stuff into their circulation. It’s a carcinogen, for God’s sake. Right. So these are small things, they’re not expensive. You know, air filters. Yes. You have to make an investment in an air filter. But the other thing, remember, that these engineers found out is that when you open the windows and the doors, you do get a reduction.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:52:42]:
Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:52:42]:
In your indoor air burden. Right. The home burden. We call humans, human accumulation, body burden. We need to start addressing our homes and the burden in our homes as well. So when possible, when permitted air ventilation, it’s called, you know, open the windows and the doors. Ventilation is a good thing.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:53:07]:
And you don’t even have to do it for long, two or three minutes. You can do it every single day, all year round, Winter, rain, anything. You just open a couple of windows and doors, change out the air in your house and then close things down again and. And you will definitely improve the indoor air quality.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:53:24]:
Absolutely.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:24]:
You don’t have to turn off your air filter while you’re doing that. I just leave it, right?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:53:29]:
No, no, no. It’s like we’re adults, we can have the air conditioning on and drive with the car windows down. Oh, talk about the noise.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:41]:
I brought mine too, look.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:53:43]:
Oh, great. I’m so happy I started a trend.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:46]:
You did.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:53:47]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:48]:
So tell Me what you have there, Louise.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:53:50]:
So this is called the air Night, and it’s nine in one and it’s got a bunch of different readings. And as you can see, just me being in here with the window closed because I was worried about noise. My CO2 is up to 812.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:04]:
Yes. Minus 737.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:54:07]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:08]:
So heavy in here.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:54:10]:
But it checks formaldehyde and it checks total VOCs, and it does PM2.5 and PM10s. And then it gives you this kind of AQI smiley face kind of down the middle. It’s got. On the. The sensors are on the back and the code to the sensors is on the bottom. It’s really easy to have. My. My one complaint is that it doesn’t really have an alarm or it. It doesn’t really have anything that notifies you. So if it suddenly goes up into the red, you have no idea unless you look at it. But it responds a lot to kitchen burning or things like that. And it has been responding here to me having the window closed. And certainly if I have patience in the room, it’ll go up a lot quicker if I don’t. If I have the window closed. It’s a. I guess it’s a tight room, even though not particularly small. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:55:04]:
The good thing about it is you can measure total VOCs, which include benzene, which is something that all of the us who have gas appliances unfortunately are exposed to to some degree. If we have a vent above our stove that vents to the outside, that reduces the benzene levels dramatically. And formaldehyde, which we talked about in Invisible Enemies, Formaldehyde is the number one carcinogen found in outdoor air. Now. Now. And it’s in our homes because formaldehyde is part of glue. And there’s a lot of glue in our furniture, and there’s a lot of glue in our luxury vinyl flooring, and there’s a lot of glue everywhere. So formaldehyde is something that we definitely want to avoid. We don’t want to breathe it. And it is in fire smoke as well. When you burn wood, formaldehyde is one of the chemicals that comes out. It’s just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Very, very simple chemical.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:03]:
So let’s move on and talk about. So we’ve talked about air monitoring. Maybe we should talk a little bit about air filters, too, before we jump into supplements and what to do for our bodies. We’ve mentioned IQ Air and Austin Air. Obviously there are other air filtration systems that are decent. Would each of you like to kind of take Turns and share your tips and thoughts about air filtration in the, in the homes.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [00:56:32]:
We can just send you to the NAEM website that has an entire handout on air filter or air filters and what to look for. But part of what you’re looking for is you’re looking for the size of the room that you’re in and how much space it’s taking, right? So if the room has really high ceilings, you need to think about that. But often they’ll talk about being able to kind of do ventilation for multiple rooms. You’ll think, oh, this will work. But, but think about how the air flows. It’s not necessarily going to go out in a hallway and around a corner and into another room. So if you’ve got, you know, an air, an air filter in one room and you’re burning something in the other room, you’re not necessarily going to deal with that smoke very effectively. So you know, when you’re starting out, the things that I say is get one for your bedroom, right? Get one for kids bedrooms, start there and then start to kind of expand into your living space or into other spaces as you can. Or if you can get one like a big unit that attaches to your H vac system. If you have an H vac system iq, air does one of those and you can kind of attach it there, there. But it has a lot to do with the volume of carbon and the size of the particle size of the filter and how tight the unit is. So having a loosey goosey unit where stuff, you know, you’ve got this amazing filter but the air can kind of go around the filter because it’s not tight, that doesn’t help either. It’s not actually going to get caught by the filter.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [00:58:04]:
So we, Kelly, I think you know this. When East Palestine happened, my, my partner and I, Dr. Fine, were so infuriated by the lack of public health guidance for these people that we knew were getting poisoned that we created a course for patients, healthcare consumers, everybody about how to thrive in this toxic world and what to do about chemical exposures and fire smoke. Bottom line is that we had a conversation with one of the air technologists at Austin Air there. I learned a lot. I think there are good technologies and there are bad technologies that should be taken off the market. Louise was talking about carbon filtration and HEPA filtration. Right. And those are the two technologies you want in your air filter. There are different grades of hepa. There’s medical HEPA and there’s made up words like ultra mega extra hepa, they mean nothing. And they, there’s, there’s no benefit to having any of those medical grade HEPA is what you want. And then I totally agree with Louise. The more weight of carbon you’ve got, the more volume you’ve got to filter all the bad stuff. And especially if you are in an area where wildfire events occur, you want the heaviest machine you can afford board. That’s the bottom line, right? The wonderful thing that the NAEM air filtration handout, which is free on the envmedicine.org, sorry, env medicine.com website, is that we calculated out not just how much the air filter costs, but how often you have to replace the cartridges. And in those lighter, maybe not as tight air filters, you’ve got to replace the cartridges more often. They even admit it. And so you have to look just like in a water filter may not cost much up front, but then you’ve got to replace those little filters every month sometimes. And so you get to the end of the year and you’re like, oh my gosh, I just spent more than I would have if I had gotten higher end air filter, water filters, filter. So that there is actually, it’s all calculated, all that is calculated. So you get to see how much you spend in five years, in a year with the higher end and the lower end air filters and then the bad ones. And I can say this because the science is there. Air filters that produce ozone and say, oh, this wonderful ozone, it gets rid of all the bacteria and all the viruses and grabs onto all the particles and drops them to the ground. Ozone is a human respiratory irritant and it causes copd. It can absolutely irritate the lungs. You don’t want to breathe ozone ever. And so it’s okay if you use ozone like we use it for smoke remediation, for furniture, you know, your insurance company will take the furniture away, put in an ozone room, no humans bring it back, you know, a month later. But you don’t want to use a filtration system that produces ozone. And then the electrostatic precipitators, there’s a huge problem with those, especially if they use titanium dioxide, they can create formaldehyde. That is the last thing that you want to be breathing if you’re trying to purify your air is you don’t want to make formaldehyde. That’s. And that is just.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:47]:
I don’t want to do that.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:01:49]:
No, you don’t want to do that. So all of the Technologies that use a electro. I don’t know how to explain this in a non technical term, but that use electrostatic filtration. You want an actual physical barrier. So HEPA is a, a cloth, right? It’s a barrier. And activated carbon is like charcoal. It’s a barrier. And those are the best filtration technologies that are safe and proven to be effective.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:21]:
So some people talk about hydroxyl filters. What about those?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:02:28]:
I think those are electrostatic precipitation filters and they’d be in the category of not recommended. And we do talk about that in the handout. So there’s more information in the free handout.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:41]:
Great, that’s wonderful. Thank you. Luis, did you want to add to that?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:02:46]:
No, just that the, the. I think the handout is like three pages long or even four pages long. And it kind of goes through a bunch of the top brands right now and really does a comparison of what is the weight of carbon and how much do filters cost and what’s the average cost of the unit and, and all the different things about it. So you can have a real sense of kind of comparing and contrasting.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:08]:
Perfect. We’ll make sure that we get that and put it in the replay notes for everyone so you don’t have to go scramble and look for it yourselves. We’ll, we’ll find that in and share it with you. Okay. Shall we talk about what we need to do for ourselves in terms of supplementation? I don’t know which one of you wants to jump in first.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:03:30]:
Well, Dr. Tolsman and I were having a conversation about this yesterday and I started out the conversation or interrupted myself by saying if I was running the country and I could put one thing in the water supply, I think it would be a very safe used for decades. Kelly knows what I’m going to say. Amino acid called N acetylcysteine. There are over 8,000 studies on N acetylcysteine. It is an antioxidant, is anti inflammatory, it’s been used to shorten the duration of the flu. I mean, you name it really. And so there are actually studies looking at humans, not just rats, but humans exposed to pollution. You know, they do these studies and they have these things called pollution chambers. And they put these, you know, brave volunteers in the pollution chamber, press the button and then boom, in comes the PM2.5. And then they can measure how inflamed and irritated their lungs are, what their breathing capacity is, et cetera. So NAC is something that our bodies sort of make, you know, cysteine is a natural amino acids in our diet. It. But it is extremely useful to have extra N acetylcysteine. It’s actually been used. Oh, that’s right, Louise, you reminded me. It’s actually been used in treating traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:05:00]:
Traumatic brain injury, but also specifically with lungs. And a lot of the research is smoking research. Right. Because we’re trying to replicate this. And smoking research isn’t really the same thing. Right. We’re not getting mercury necessarily with the cigarette. We’re not getting lead with a cigarette, we hope. And so, you know, but.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:05:20]:
And we’re getting cadmium.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:05:21]:
We’re getting cadmium and we’re. But we’re getting something burned. We’re getting a smoke that is kind of going into the lungs. And so that research shows that NAC prevents a lot of the COPD like symptoms, the edema, the fluid in the lungs, even the cardiovascular stuff like able to. To kind of prevent mis that the smoke kind of can induce in the. In the heart. So, yeah, really beneficial and doesn’t necessarily need to be taken in advance. A lot of the studies are, you know, we give you NAC at the same time as a smoke exposure and what happens to you as compared to somebody who just got smoke exposure without it. So that’s something that you can basically.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:06:03]:
Stockpile, Although it’s not going to hurt you to take it every day. Day, in fact.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:06:09]:
And we’re being exposed every single day.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:06:12]:
Right.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:06:12]:
Like today, right outside. Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:06:15]:
Right. And it’s very safe. The studies have shown incredible safety profiles. Except for people who have active peptic ulcers. Those are the only folks in whom I would caution not to take NAC because it will thin the mucus lining of your stomach and might make your ulcer worse. So otherwise, it’s been used in children and in adults. And a lot of studies look at dosages for adults around 1,800 to 2,500 milligrams a day.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:06:45]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:46]:
So I have a couple of questions that I think some of my patients would ask would be be, can I take glutathione instead? Or do I. Do I have to take NAC and glutathione?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:06:59]:
So we used to really, when. When we were in school, it was like NAC is the building block box of glutathione. You take NAC to make glutathione. Now we know NAC has its own world of benefit separate from glutathione. And glutathione is great. I think some of the complications with glutathione is that a lot of the supplements aren’t necessarily good quality and you aren’t necessarily getting them in. It’s expensive. NAC is not expensive. And I think that they do actually have different actions. If you’re a person who is getting glutathione and you’re getting a good source of glutathione and it feels good in your body, I would add nac. And if you’re out there not doing anything, I would probably just start with nac.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:42]:
And then what. What about the people who have problems with the sulfur? Because cysteine is a sulfur based compound, I’ve been typically suggesting that they start on some molybdenum. And do you have anything else to add besides that for those patients?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:08:01]:
Just that I see less reaction with NAC than I do with glutathione. For my to especially the toxic patients or the mass cell patients or. Yeah, sulfur patients.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:08:12]:
I agree. I would agree. Absolutely. Yeah. Admolum is really the missing link in the body’s capacity to metabolize sulfur. Right. And. And we don’t get molybdenum in our diets.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:30]:
Right?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:08:31]:
None of us do.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:32]:
And I think especially with many of the mast cell patients who are on a low histamine diet and they’re very restricted in their, their dietary intake, they’re going to be nutrient deficient, molybdenum deficient, and therefore have more problems with the sulfur sulfur base compounds.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:08:47]:
So get your molybdenum in low dose, 500 micrograms. You don’t have to take a lot. It’s a one little pill.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:58]:
Okay. NAC and the accouterments, if necessary. What else would you suggest people put in their arsenal for wild smoke, fire, green tea. Green tea, okay.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:09:13]:
Yes, green tea is critical.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:09:15]:
Green tea is critical. It’s so anti inflammatory. But they actually did this great human study again with benzene exposure. So pump workers, four groups. So you were a pump worker and a smoker or a pump worker and not a smoker, and you had these exposures to benzene and you were taking or not taking green tea. And basically the benzene levels was high in all the pump workers. But in the folks that were taking the green tea, they had reduced oxidative stress in their body. So their glutathione systems were better, their red blood cell systems were better. It was, it was almost to the normal levels, almost to the control levels of the people who weren’t working in benzene. Wow.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:00]:
Okay. Do we have to drink it or can we take it as a extract or supplement.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:10:06]:
I think this was not a lot, Louise. Right.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:10:09]:
This was six cups, was 150 mil per cup. So it’s not the typical two, not the typical 250 mil cups, but the 150 mil cups.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:20]:
Okay.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:10:20]:
Small cups. Ch. It was a Chinese study. You know, little tiny cups.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:25]:
Okay. It’s still a lot of green tea for somebody who doesn’t like green tea.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:10:29]:
Yeah. Just because we just did this invisible enemies webinar in case you think you’re not exposed to benzene because you don’t pump gas and you don’t smoke. The data on gas stoves, as well as other gas appliances like furnaces, shows that if you have your burner on high, just one burner on your stove on high for, I think this was about 40 minutes, or your oven at a high temperature, I think was about 425 for an hour. The bends. And no, you know, you’re not using your fan. Cement fan. The benzene levels in the bedroom furthest from the kitchen. In this study they did, I think about 80 homes were higher than the EPA allowable levels for air. Air levels of benzene. So sadly, what we have been taught, right, Is that natural gas, it’s clean, it’s safe, it’s effective, it’s. It’s economical. It is if you have a really good vent fan above your stove and you turn it on every time you turn on the gas. The reason I got that nine in one little unit that you both have is that I wanted to find out what the difference was. Right. And this is. It’s a really. I think somebody just told me they’re on sale now for something like $88.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:53]:
So buy three.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:11:54]:
They’re usually. Yeah. So I did a bunch of experiments, and sure enough, the VOCs, when I put it next to my stove top, went up into the thousands. I did not have my vent fan on. When I had my vent fan on, it was pretty, pretty low. So I think, you know, the problem with vent fans is that people don’t use them because they interrupt conversation, they’re laughing loud, but they’re life saving. We need to use them. Absolutely.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:12:28]:
That’s crazy. Okay, I. We do have a couple of questions, but I think that you guys have more supplements to talk about. So.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:12:35]:
Yeah. You want to talk about the bees?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:12:38]:
I want to talk about the bees. So this was another human study, and this was exactly the pollution chamber. They went into chambers, and it was a crossover study, meaning it was the same group of people that were either Kind of exposed to smoke without any B vitamins or had been taking B vitamins. And this time it was actually in advance. I think they did four weeks of B vitamins and then they went into the smoke chamber and then they were measuring a bunch of DNA damage. So they were actually doing blood testing afterwards to see, you know, how toxic were these, was the smoke. And in the B vitamin group group, they minimized or even eliminated that damage to the DNA. Wow. You know, this is. These are all cheap supplements, right? Or foods drinking green tea, really highly accessible everywhere and so can be so crucial and beneficial when we know we’re being exposed all the time.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:37]:
Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:13:38]:
And all this list is, by the way, it’s on the free handout at the NH site for Fire Smoke Action Plan. And the studies are actually referenced. So if you’re a geek like us and you want to look up the studies, you can. And then remind me, Louise, about vitamin C and vitamin E. Weren’t they used with the B vitamins? No, I think I’m thinking of another study. But vitamin C and vitamin E are also important.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:14:05]:
There was a study looking at arterial reactivity and stricture, and they did B12 with C, but they actually did a very tiny amount. I think they did 500 milligrams of C and 500 micrograms of B12. But they, even with that small amount, they showed that the vessels were more. Were more able to dilate easily and were less kind of constricted. Right. So when you think about a heart attack, which we know is increased risk in smokers, this is kind of reducing that.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:14:36]:
Right. And increased risk during the time of a wildfire. You know, those, they’ve looked at those studies like both admissions for angina in ers and also actual documented heart attacks and strokes, significantly increased incidents following a wildfire event.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:01]:
Other, other supplements. I mean, that’s a fantastic list. So nac, the B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, green fish oil with fish.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:15:11]:
Oil have shown that fish oil also minimizes damage from pollutant exposure. I believe that was. That was a study done in seniors, actually. And their. Their polluted air exposure, their airborne pollutant exposure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:31]:
What about nebulized NAC or nebulized glutathione, particularly for people who have asthma. Is that something that you would recommend acutely?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:15:43]:
Yes, it’s hard right now to find nac. You can buy it, I think at the pharmacy as it’s mucoming. Missed. Right. But you compounded, you get glutathione. I think it’s great. The issue with glutathione as a compounded nebulized is that it does not have a long shelf life. So this is not something that you can kind of stockpile. This is something you need to get in real time as the exposure is happening. And then it’s got a shelf life, you know, six weeks shelf life. So, like, you, you don’t. You need to be using it, basically.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:15]:
Right, right. And you have to find a compounding pharmacist who has it. And.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:16:20]:
And you need a prescription to get it. Yeah, but some people, you know, can get prescriptions from their doctors and have a standing order so that when something actually happens, they could just kind of request. Request some and then be able to do it. But it can definitely really help your lungs. You can feel it.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:16:37]:
And it’s something we actually prescribe for patients with the diagnosis of COPD as treatment that is very effective. So that would definitely be ongoing in somebody with copd, but especially important if they live in an area with a lot of air pollution or risk for wildfire events.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:16:58]:
And we didn’t talk about this earlier when we were talking about testing, but this is my pet testing desire is that Everybody knows their alpha 1 antitrust trypsin genetic makeup. Okay, you can get a free test. You can order it as physicians, you can get a bunch of tests in your office. There’s two options. There’s the cheek swab, which will just give you the genetics, and you can do a finger poke, which will give you the genetics and your blood level of Alpha 1. So Alpha 1 Antitrypsin is made in the liver and it goes to the lungs and it helps to stop elastase. So when we have a smoke exposure, this enzyme is kind of trying to stop the smoke exposure. It’s very inflammatory, but it’s also damaging your cells, the cells in the lungs. So when that doesn’t get stopped because you have a mutated alpha 1 antitrypsin, you end up with COPD. And so this testing is usually done in people who are diagnosed with copd. Most people who are diagnosed with COPD are smokers. If you have this deficiency, obviously wildfire smoke, cigarette smoke, any kind of smoke is going to be that much more dangerous in your lungs. So I test everybody, and I feel like that is kind of a little bit of knowledge of, like, how careful do you need to be? Are you wearing a respirator when it’s 50? Are you wearing a respirator when it’s 100? Like now you need to protect your lungs because you can’t, you’ve got this mutation where you can’t actually stop that cascade as well and you’re doing more damage.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:18:34]:
You know, this is the only time we’re ever taught to look for. This is a rule out for when people have elevated liver enzymes. Right. That’s one of the rule outs that you look at in addition to many other diseases. But otherwise most doctors will not look, look for it because they don’t know why they would want to diagnose it prior to the onset of a lung disease. And what I hear you saying is it is a challenge if you have this enzyme deficiency. So you just have to be more protective of your lungs, right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:11]:
Yeah.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:19:12]:
And I think it’s one of those things of did you have power when you have knowledge? Right. So if you know that your lungs are susceptible, like why are we waiting until we end up with a diagnosis of COPD? Why not actually get tested? And it’s Alpha ID I as an ice cream D as in dog.com that has all the tests, the test kits that you can just order and they’re really easy to do. Like I said, they’re finger poke or they’re a cheek swab and you can, can ship them direct to patients or you can have them in your office and you can do them in real time. And you know, most people have a totally normal alpha one, right? So it’s like most peoples are normal, but every now and then there’s somebody who’s got a mutated one and then we have that conversation and I then continue to monitor their blood level of Alpha 1 because you’d be surprised how many people actually are running with low blood levels of Alpha 1. I don’t know yet how to bring it up. And so if anybody has ideas, I’m open to them, but I’m doing experiments on folks to just try and see does glutathione, does nebulize glutathione? Like what helps to kind of bring it up.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:23]:
Fascinating. That’s really great. Thank you so much, Louise. Okay, we have quite a number of questions, 16 questions and not too much time. So let’s see what we can do. Please repeat the link for air. Air quality. I think that was air now.gov a.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:20:43]:
I r n o w.gov okay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:48]:
And purpleair.com.com thank you. If one is to visit LA later this month and stay in a hotel in Santa Monica, which was relatively close to the wildfires, would you reasonably expect the hotel filters to be saturated and still breathing? Breathing Those chemicals in from the fire or after a few rains, are those particulates floating in the air, grounded?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:21:12]:
Oh, that’s a. I’m trying to figure out how to give a short answer to that question.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:17]:
I know.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:21:18]:
I mean, I do think the air. I think the air outside would be grounded. The question is, did the hotel change their filters? Did the hotel do any kind of cleaning inside the space? Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:21:29]:
So the study we just talked about, about how the walls, the ceiling, the floors, especially. Carpet. Carpet, yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:37]:
You know, they didn’t do anything. And the. The carpet vacuums are not HEPA vacuums. They’re just, you know, they’re just picking up the lint off the floor. They’re not getting any real.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:21:48]:
Exactly. So it sounds like we have a consensus. The answer is no.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:21:53]:
Right. And so finding a hotel room with a window that opens.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:21:57]:
Yeah.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:21:58]:
Right. And opening the window and leaving the window running the entire night, open the. Open the window and. Yeah, and turning off maybe the air in the room, like turning off something that’s going to blow other stuff around.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:22:11]:
Yeah. Okay. That’s a good solution to a difficult challenge. Michael asked, can you say more about the 1 +1 equals 100? Why logarithmic or multiplier effect in play? What are the mechanisms?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:22:30]:
We have a scientist here who wants the actual physics and chemistry of the equation. And I can’t give it to you, but I can refer you to the EPA because they’ve done the. They’ve done the math on this, and it is well known for pesticides. So I’m specifically talking about pesticide research. However, there is some research looking at a combination of lead and cadmium that shows that the effects are much more than arithmetic. And that has to do with human biochemistry, that our body has the capacity. You know, we evolved in the times when the volcanoes were spewing massive amounts of mercury into the air.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:23:11]:
Right.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:23:12]:
We, our bodies make glutathione for a reason, but we are limited in our capacity to handle toxic exposures. And once we reach that breaking point. Dr. Ray used to call this, you know, the barrel effect. The barrel starts too much water in the barrel, things start to spill over. So there is a limit to what our bodies can handle. And so that’s where that logarithmic equation comes from, is the limitation that we have to be able to metabolize and excrete these toxins.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:23:47]:
Mexicans, the masters. Actually, in the. In the meta analysis with the firefighters that was published in 2006, she talks about this as well. And part of it in the firefighters was. It’s also a combination of it coming in through different ways in the body. Right. You’re breathing it in, you’re eating it, and you’re getting it on your skin. And so now you’ve actually got the same. Even if it’s the same chemical coming in in different ways into circulation. And that is also kind of potentizing what the exposure actually is. Because usually we study an exposure out through a single route. And what happens when you’re actually getting it through multiple routes at the same time and multiple chemicals at the same time, they. They synergize and you need less of each in order to have that effect. Effect. So if you needed this much lead and this much arsenic, suddenly you need less if you’re bringing both in at the same time.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:24:46]:
Okay. How to properly vacuum walls, curtains, and most of most effectively after wild smoke enters the home or even after a bad kitchen fire. So we talked a little bit about that. Is there anything more you want to say about it?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:25:02]:
Like there’s a company called. I don’t have any connection with them financially, but meal M I E L E that makes HEPA vacuums and they’re. The suction is on a wand, pretty long wand. So you can actually vacuum your walls. Yeah, you can vacuum walls, ceilings and countertops. There’s no reason you can’t.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:25:26]:
The canister vacuum with a long hose and can move around and. Yeah, it’s great.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:25:33]:
So if you don’t have access to a respirator, are you going to get any benefit from using N95 masks at all?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:25:42]:
No.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:25:43]:
What the N95 does, that’s clear, 95% of 2.5 and does nothing really for gases or any other substances. So you’re blocking 95%. So. So, you know, if I was suddenly dropped somewhere in the middle of a wildfire and I had no respirator and I had nothing, I would absolutely put on an N95 if I had that. But it’s not going to get the gases out and it’s not going to block 100% of the particles. And so I know that I’m having a massive exposure.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:26:12]:
Yeah. And there is a step up from an N95 called an N100. That is a thicker mask and it’s got a nose clip on it that is. Is bendable so you can actually get a better fit that is, in my humble opinion, much more, much preferable to an N95.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:26:34]:
And these you can buy everywhere. They have them at Ace Hardware. They have them at Home Depot. They have them all over the place and they’re like 25 or 30 bucks for the unit and the same for the filters. So you, it doesn’t. You buy them and you put them in a box and you wait until you need them and then you use them. But it. They. They are accessible everywhere, so you don’t need to. They’re not hard to find.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:27:00]:
For those impacted by wildfires. What are the different directories of professionals who are accredited and might be considered to hire out in terms of assessment, remediation or any other relevant services of higher quality to come out and help?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:27:15]:
What do you think about the IEPs through ICI?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:27:18]:
That’s what I was just thinking. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:27:20]:
Yeah. So the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness has a listing of medical professionals, but also indoor environmental professionals. And many of them have credentialing above and beyond mold. Even though many of them are mold experts, they can, can probably help with that. So that’s a good place to start. And quite a number of them also do virtual consults. So I would, I would look there. Lynn, you also mentioned industrial hygienists. Do they have a database or is there a credentialing that you’re aware of?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:27:59]:
I think they do, but I don’t have access to it. The problem is that most of them work industrially. Right, Right. They work for large corporations, large businesses. They’re used to going into events that occur as a result of an industrial accident. So I think probably an IEP would be much more accessible.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:28:22]:
And Change the air Foundation. ChangeTheAir Foundation.org has a bunch of free downloads and they’ve got instructions on how to hire an iep. They are definitely a mold focused organization. They do other things for the air. So it’s changed the air. And it’s not just mold, but they definitely have a lot of mold resources on there and they have how to hire an IEP in their free download section resources.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:51]:
And I would think a building biologist might have some education about that too. So buildingbiology.org you could find a building biologist and.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:29:02]:
And you know who I just thought of as enthalpy. Do you know that organization that is a private business that focuses on air. Indoor air evaluation in residential homes. They definitely are well trained in every aspect of indoor air evaluation and are networked with a lot of IEPs to do indoor air evaluation, you know, testing for solvents and a lot of other things. Pesticides.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:29:33]:
Right. Let’s see. Are things that are not solvable, salvageable per your view, in a big fire. Would you strongly consider removing them from the inside or the outside of the property instead of trying to remediate. So they weren’t really clear what we’re talking about. But, you know, say, like with Jill’s office, you know, everything around her was destroyed. She’s not going to destroy her office. What can she save? What can she salvage? What, what do you have to get rid of?

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:30:09]:
I, I think some of that has to do with how big was the exposure that came into the house. So how tight was your house in terms of the smoke that came into it and how well are you getting the air remediated as you’re wiping the walls and ceilings and doing all the things? And if, if it’s not, then I do think the first place we go to is the stuff that is soft. Right. Like the couches and the chairs and the things that couldn’t have absorbed in addition to adsorbed. And it’s very hard to get to the middle of a couch to try to get those chemicals out. So those things end up being the bigger things or carpeting that you can’t remove.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:30:49]:
Right. So kind of similar to how you would think about molds, toxins and mold spores, it’s the soft things that can’t be cleaned. So the next question is similar. If one’s home has burned down from the wildfires with all the chemically rich products and building materials, and the decision is made to build a new home on the same site, what special considerations apply to best ensure what may have been absorbed into the ground or absorbed into the ground doesn’t somehow affect the inhabitants after the construction?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:31:23]:
Yeah, so usually there will be lead in the soil and the soil will have to be remediated. And for those of you that are living in la, there are, are, you know, I don’t know how many, but up to 50 or 60 or 80 dump trucks a day that are driving soil, hopefully to someplace far away, but to a toxic waste storage site because of that soil contamination. How deep you have to go for remediation? That’s something that you would have to test for.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:31:59]:
For.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:32:00]:
Yeah, Fungia Farm.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:32:04]:
Oh, yes, right.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:32:06]:
Levi, he’s doing Myco remediation and has been using mushrooms. Using mushrooms. And he’s been able to have the mushrooms remediate the soil. They suck up the contaminants. And he has, has been just doing amazing things where he’ll inoculate an entire piece of burlap and then you kind of, you spread it out over the ground and it’ll start to kind of Grow make this whole mycelium suck up a lot of the different chemicals. And he’s been able to test those all. And then you obviously don’t eat those mushrooms. You toss them. But it’s fungi farm. Yeah.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:32:48]:
Does that include metal? Sluys are just volatile Sl.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:32:51]:
He said, I think he was using grasses for metals or he wasn’t doing grasses, but he had had these various grasses pull up zinc and a bunch of other things outside of a mining place. But he’s. This has been. These are more carbon based. So this will pull up carbon based, which I think includes. I think he’s pulling up lead because I think it’s leaded gas. That is. It’ll eat.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:33:18]:
You know, there’s also a really great study that was done by the California EPA in Berkeley where they remediated, and this is well known in the remediation industry, they remediated lead contaminated soil with fish bones. And they fish bones, like our bones, absorb lead. And they were actually able to totally remediate the soil just by spreading probably a large quantity of fish bones into the soil. They’ve also done this in Texas. So these are actual studies of how to remediate lead contaminated soil.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:33:56]:
Fascinating. Okay, let’s see. Tricia asked about ozone machines. Offer any help at all? Only if you’re ozonating your belongings, perhaps.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:34:08]:
Right, right. So that for home fires. Right. The insurance company will take the couches. Actually, my office burned down, so I have personal experience with this. Take all the furniture from the inside of the building away to a special remediation facility where they literally permeate the air with ozone and then use some kind of ventilation fans to get those particulates, you know, attached to the ozone to drop to the ground. And then they vacuum them up. And so ozone is perfectly safe if there’s no humans around. Okay, right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:34:51]:
Any opinions on what types of box fans or other machines to help with air filters in addition? And we kind of talked about the different, different qualities of air filters, but.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:35:05]:
I think they’re talking about Corsi. Corsi Rosenthal filters. You know, DIYs. So there is an actual link in the air filtration guide that NAEM gives you for free. That takes you to. I think it’s the University of Washington research site that shows you how to make a box fan that actually works. The problem is they’re using MERV 13 filters. Right. Like you get for your H Vac system at Home Depot. And MRF 13s are now actually mandated by the state of California for New homes, right. They, they, you can’t use anything less than a MRF 13. The problem is that in an event. So this is a, a box fan you build with painter’s tape, MRF 13 filters, and a fan you get at, you know, Home Depot for $15. And so it is pulling the air through the MRF filters and then spewing it out. And the problem is that you have to change the, the MRV 13 filters. They’re those little paper pleated filters that you get, and you can buy a whole carton of them at Home Depot. You have to change them almost every 24 to 48 hours in a, in an event. And that’s a lot of construction. You’re making these things yourself. Right. So there actually have been some good published studies by Corsi and Rosenthal, the guys that invented these filters originally for filtration of SARS CoV2 viruses in schools and stuff. And they have a pretty good clean air delivery rate. So actually, if they’re built well and sealed really well. But just imagine every two days, you’re a busy human, maybe you have children, you have a. Kelly’s already shaking her head, you can rip the painter’s tape off, reconstruct the Corsi Rosenthal box filter. And again, like, you’ve got to add up all the cartons of MERV 13 filters that you’re buying to replace the ones that are full of well first. So in a pinch, like Louis said, that’s all I had. I would certainly use it. It’s just that it’s labor intensive and you have to look at the time money equation.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:37:24]:
It’s labor intensive. And I would, I would probably use duct tape over painter’s tape, although the painter’s tape would probably open it easier. You really want to make sure it’s tight. Otherwise you are just kind of blowing more things around. And the filters are open. Right. So all four sides are filters with the. On the top is a fan. And so if you walk past it or you brush it, or you have kids or you have dogs or you have cats, right. There’s a chance you’re just kind of brushing a bunch of stuff that has now accumulated onto the filter back into your world. So there’s that too. But I agree, in a pinch, and they clearly work. I mean, the images people have of them being just completely black in homes, they work. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:38:09]:
Great. Couple more. I know we’re a little over time. Thanks for. I mean, this is fascinating. So I don’t know, I don’t know if you Guys are okay, but which blood tests, functional medicine tests, tools and technologies that functional medicine doctors who are less specialized with environmental medicine would you say are not necessarily worse worth the money and why?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:38:33]:
I’m sorry, can you just restate that question?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:38:35]:
Yeah, it’s kind of like what are the tests that functional medicine docs are doing who don’t really know very much about environmental medicine that might not be worth people’s time, money and effort. Right. Because you guys are environmental medicine doctors. What are you seeing some of our less, less environmentally savvy colleagues ordering that might not be. Be worth the money. If you want to comment. Or we could say, what test would you recommend? I guess is maybe a better question.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:39:04]:
Well, what I would say about the other is there’s, there’s a piece of interpretation. The test that we don’t have, that none of us have, that we all wish we had, is the wand where we get to kind of go down and it tells us everything that’s in the body. There is no test that shows you what’s in the body. Even when we do a blood lead, we are seeing what’s in circulation in your blood in this moment. Every test has its flaws. And I think the problem becomes that it’s easy to go online and see, like, here’s a big toxin panel, let’s run it. And then you get a bunch of results and you’re not sure what to do with the results. And that can be a problem because it’s not necessarily. You have to understand what the test is actually telling us. Us. Right. Is the test telling us you’re a bad excretor, you’re a good excretor, you’re having these exposures, you’re not having these exposures, et cetera.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:39:57]:
So yeah, yes, I can certainly echo that because I train doctors and lecture to doctors who are not specialists in environmental medicine. And that is the biggest mistake that doctors make is by throwing a big net out there. And whatever comes back in the net must be the problem. Even though there’s no research showing that the signs and symptoms correlate with that particular toxicant. And that’s why you kind of have to know environmental medicine to practice it. So we could talk a lot about the bad tests. There are good, there are lots of bad tests out there. The good tests, I think, are the low hanging fruit of looking for metals in the urine. Urine. And in the blood. And there are some good labs that do that, including the conventional laboratories like Quest and LabCorp. There is a lab that I have worked with That I think has done a heroic amount of work to try to validate their technology. And that’s Imosaic laboratories. But they test for a very limited number of. Of toxicants. And so it’s the same problem. You throw that net out there. Whatever comes back in the net, that must be the problem. So that. That I think the problem, I think, is doing testing without doing an adequate intake and understanding of the patient’s exposures. Right. Somebody who lives on a golf course, you know what their exposures are. You don’t have to test them. It’s unnecessary. Waste of money.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:41:35]:
Absolutely. Last question, because I think this is important, too. We spend so much of our time in our cars. What are the best car filters?

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:41:44]:
Oh, gosh. The IQ Air makes a good car filter. But there’s another one.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:41:49]:
You can change out your regular filter in the car for a HEPA filter. So that’s the first thing you can do that’s really simple. Every car has a regular filter that you can have access to that you can change for a HEPA. And then there’s the additional filters.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:03]:
Okay, that’s.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:42:04]:
Yeah. Dr. McCarter is identifying a company. EI Faust.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:09]:
Oh, El Faust.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:42:11]:
That. That has made air filtration for a very long time. They’ve been in the business for a long time. So apparently they make a car filter that she’s used.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:20]:
Yeah. F. CO. Thanks, Stephanie.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:42:23]:
And that’s a separate filter. So that’s a filter. That’s like. Like, the first thing I would say is, is check your car filter. Especially if you’re in California. Check your car filter, Change your car filter, get a hepa, change it again in a month. Like, just keep changing it. You’d be shocked, because we don’t really think about our cars as having filters, and we don’t really track that we can actually go in there and change them. And definitely, if you’ve been driving around on the streets, you’re getting that in there. So change that because that’s the first level. And then add an extra one into the car. Are. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:42:55]:
Okay. I’m gonna let everybody go. There were a couple questions that we didn’t get to. I’m so sorry, but you both have been magnificent. Thank you so much for all of your input and your wisdom. I learned a lot. I’m sure everybody listening did, too. And thank you, everyone, for being here. We’ll let people know about the raffle. And I. I think that there will also be a code for the Austin error to. If you didn’t win the raffle then you can certainly pick up an Austin error at a discount. So next week sometime we’ll get the replay. We’ll put all the resources in there, some links to the supplements and then if you guys want to share where people can find you, that would be really helpful.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:43:43]:
Yeah. I run a company called called EMEI Global, stands for Environmental Medicine Education International global.com and we do offer courses for healthcare providers. And then we made a course for everyone about toxic and exposures because we were so pissed about East Palestine. I mean, I won’t go, I won’t go on, on about that but. But we did. In making the course, we learned so much more about how we can be proactive and take care of ourselves. So just like the stuff we’ve been talking about today, just in more detail. It’s about nine hours of presentation and lecture.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:44:29]:
Fantastic.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:44:30]:
And Louise I my website, I’m in Portland I my website is Doc Louise D O C L O-U-I-S E.com and we are both on the board of NAEM and NAEM is a resource for physicians. The website, when you first go to the website envmedicine.com you will see the wildfire smoke pop up immediately. But if you are a physician and you actually want to have access to a lot more understanding about environmental medicine, that is the place to go. Because we have these clinical guidelines on metals and plastics and personal care products and microplastics and EMF solvents, pesticides. Lynn just did a great webinar on pesticides. So we have webinars and we have clinical guidelines on where is it, what is it it, how is it getting into the body? And also questionnaires that you can give to patients to be able to kind of get a sense of is there a problem that’s an environmental problem and where is it coming from? So that’s my plug to join naem.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:45:44]:
Yes, fantastic organization. And of course in terms of other organizations, there’s the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, which we talked about, and the American, American Academy of Environmental Medicine. So thank you both so much. Thank you to Michelle for our back end. You guys were great. And thank you for our participants. I really enjoy spending time with you and sharing this information with you and bringing fantastic, amazing guests. So until next time, take care everyone and thank you again.

Dr. Lyn Patrick [01:46:17]:
Take care.

Dr. Louise Tolzman [01:46:18]:
Take care. Bye.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host The Spring Center’s very own Brigid McCann and Alexa Thompson for our most recent webinar. We discussed our personal, daily supplement regimens and the foundational role supplements play in our health routines. Brigid and Alexa each highlighted their top non-negotiables, emphasizing benefits for gut health, brain function, detoxification, immune resilience, and aging well. I also shared my trusted sleep protocol, favorite tools for mold detox, and supplement strategies for sensitive patients, including those with MCAS. We discussed timing, delivery forms, and how to tailor a supplement plan to individual lifestyles and needs, including how to use supplements preventatively and supportively during illness.

Recommended products from Dr. Kelly:

• Phosphatidylcholine (PC) – Cellular repair, detox, brain health

• Liposomal Glutathione – Detoxification, antioxidant support

• Methyl B Complex – Supports methylation, detox, energy, brain clarity

• Sleep Support – Blend with 5-HTP, magnolia bark, valerian, passion flower, melatonin, L-theanine (for mood and sleep)

• RevivaMag – Magnesium L-threonate; crosses blood-brain barrier, supports sleep and cognitive function (Coming to the shop soon)

• Vital Magnesium – Magnesium citrate, glycinate, and malate for constipation, headaches, overall magnesium needs

• Healthy Hair Formula – Formulated by Dr. McCann; supports hair regrowth, especially in thyroid patients

• Complete Immune – Zinc, quercetin, NAC, vitamin D, vitamin C

• Virex Plus – Antiviral, anti-inflammatory, includes NAC, astragalus, turmeric, oregano, bromelain, berberine, licorice

• Transfer Factor Multi-Immune – Immune modulation (NK cells, TH1/TH2 balance)

• Anti-InflamX – Curcumin, quercetin, resveratrol; supports detox, mold protocols

• Endocalyx Pro – Vascular support, endothelial lining repair

• Mito Support Daily – Antioxidant-rich multivitamin with NAC, resveratrol, green tea extract

• Mineral Support – Replenishes trace minerals lost through modern farming practices

Browse Dr. Kelly’s supplement shop here!

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:02]:
Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you so much for spending some of your time with us today. We’re so excited here at the Spring center to share and highlight some of our employees and our folks who make this whole place work. Because it is all about taking care of patients and it’s a team effort to do that. Like, takes a village, right? I have my assistant Michelle hanging out in the chat to answer any questions. But we love to hear where people are coming and coming in from, joining us from. So please put a little hello and where you’re from in the chat. How did you find out about this webinar? It’s so amazing to see the many, many places that people are joining us from. So please say hi, we’d love to hear from you and maybe even some of your questions. So we do have a separate Q and A that we will do. So drop your questions in the Q and A portion and say your highs and share where you’re from in the chat. And if you’re a patient, great. If you’re not a patient, even better. We love everyone here. So what we’re going to spend time today talking about is what’s in our medicine cabinet. And I know this is an important topic for so many people because you go to the store and you think, you look at the walls of vitamins, you think, what the heck am I supposed to take? Right? And so we’re hopefully going to break it down here a little bit for everyone so that you have a better idea as to what people in the business, not just myself, but also members of our staff, take to help keep themselves healthy. So today I have with me Brigid McCann. You might guess she’s somewhat related. I think the last name gave it away. Bridge. She’s my sister. And, and we also, and we also have Alexa Thompson, who is one of our staff. I’ll let them tell their stories a little bit and, and share with you who they are and why they take what they take and all that. So I think Brigid shared that she wanted to go first, so I’ll let her go first.

Brigid McCann [00:02:33]:
Okay. So hi everyone. Thanks for joining and thanks doctor for the the sneaky intro. So essentially I am Brigid McCann. I’m the practice director here. I’ve been with the spring center for 13 years. So I’ve really helped with the evolution of am grateful and honored to be a part of it and helping in patients journeys every day. And so it’s really helped benefit my life, my well being, my family’s well being, my community, my friends. Simply sharing the knowledge that I’ve learned from this experience and working with Dr. McCann. So I do have certain non negotiables in my medicine cabinet that I take daily. And obviously, you know, it’s, you want a habit stack. And that’s kind of what’s helped me is I put out my supplements at night before I go to bed so that I can take them in the morning. And then I prepare my supplements and my fiance’s before we go to bed at night. And it’s just part of our daily habits. Right. It’s part of our routine. So it makes it easy and seamless and we know what’s going on. So I will say probably one of the questions was if you had to choose one, one supplement only, what would you choose? And I’m going to go bring it back 2500 years ago or just is it 2500 A.D. when I don’t know. Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut. Well, let’s put a positive spin on that and say all health begins in the gut. Right. So the gut is where our immune system thrives or, you know, goes by the wayside. Right. So I would say a good probiotic, this one is ultrabiotic 100. So we do have two, one’s ultrabiotic and one’s ultrabiotic 100. The 100 means it has a hundred billion ICUs, is that right? Dr. CFU. CFUs. CFUs. So that means that one pill, one capsule has 100 billion organisms, organisms that are good bacteria, helping support the bacteria, the good organisms, the good healthy flora in your gut. Right. So that to me is a non negotiable and it helps my gut stay healthy and regular. Doctor, do you have any questions on that one?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:05:09]:
I think that’s pretty straightforward. So take it for your gut health. You take it to help support your gut microbiome.

Brigid McCann [00:05:16]:
Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:05:18]:
And you know, it is also supporting your immune system by diminishing the bad bacteria that are there too. So it has a variety of different reasons or, or benefit. Benefits.

Brigid McCann [00:05:34]:
Yeah, definitely. Okay. So I also take, this is another non negotiable and kind of piggybacking on gut health and the importance of having a healthy gut flora is PC. Okay. So it’s by the company Body Bio and PC is short for phosphatidylcholine. Okay. Because PC is way easier to say, but it does help with your overall gut health. But more importantly, there’s so many amazing benefits that it helps with mental focus, brain function and cellular repair. And how I understand it Because I’m on the business side, I’m on the back end. That’s why you don’t always see me in the front so much anymore. The layman’s terms that I understand it from a non medical professional, is that it? It helps free cellular repair. So here’s your cel. PC goes in and it clears out all the gunk and the junk in your cells and then that kind of goes out and you detox that out of your system, whether through sweat, you know, urination, whatnot, it gets rid of it and then it creates and forms your cell to become more healthy, a healthy cellular membrane. Is that, is that accurate?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:06:51]:
Yes, that’s absolutely accurate. Yeah.

Brigid McCann [00:06:53]:
So PC is like this little gold warrior. Because it’s a gold capsule. I can show you what it looks like. It comes in two forms. So it’s either.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:07:02]:
So here it is, pretty big capsule.

Brigid McCann [00:07:05]:
It’s a large capsule. But listen, just drink a lot of water with. Doesn’t have any discomfort or like undesirable aftertaste or anything. It’s very, very clean. But it’s like this PC kind of gladiator going in. It’s a cellular gladiator to take care of your health. Think of like, who’s that amazing actor who did the gladiator? Russell. Russell Crowe. Casey is your Russell Crow gladiator for yourselves. Okay.

Alexa Thompson [00:07:35]:
All right.

Brigid McCann [00:07:35]:
You need this because it does. It helps with brain function. Because I have a lot of brain fog. I’ve lived in moldy places, so I have had issues with brain fog myself and not being, you know, you, I still, I live in a moldy place. True story. So basically I need PC that is a non negotiable.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:07:57]:
Fantastic. What’s your third? Non negotiable.

Brigid McCann [00:08:02]:
It’s a little tricky, but I would say I’m going to stick with methyl B complex. Okay, so it’s a vita. This is a vitamin B powerhouse. Doctor actually formulated this herself probably over 10 years ago, maybe 11, 12 years ago. Uh, and it is just a true vitamin B powerhouse. I have the gene. What is it? Mthfr. That means that I don’t necessarily methylate properly or I need assistance methylating. So I’m more sensitive. Right. And what I understand it is that methylation can act as a dimmer switch, you know, when you dim the light and it doesn’t always work. Right. But having something like methyl B complex helps to be like, oh, we can turn the light back on, we can start. Hey guys, everybody get things moving. Let’s help with this detoxification. Immune support, energy and brain function. Let’s get it rolling.

Alexa Thompson [00:09:05]:
Right.

Brigid McCann [00:09:05]:
They’re like telling the people on the bottom of the boats to start rowing.

Alexa Thompson [00:09:09]:
Right.

Brigid McCann [00:09:09]:
So that’s what it’s indicating. So I do feel that I have a little bit more energy and a little bit more brain clarity. It does make your urine yellow. Don’t, don’t worry about that. That is absolutely normal. Okay. And doctor can tell you why?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:09:32]:
Yeah, I think the, the B vitamins there, many of them are colored yellow and if you don’t need everything because they’re water soluble, you’re going to urinate them out and that’s okay.

Brigid McCann [00:09:42]:
Okay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:09:45]:
Are there supplements that you tried that you, you didn’t stick with because they, they weren’t as helpful over the years. Have there been anything like that?

Brigid McCann [00:09:55]:
There probably have been, but I don’t.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:09:57]:
Remember them because that’s okay.

Brigid McCann [00:09:59]:
And I, I will say I do circulate like these are, what I’m sharing are truly my non negotiables. I do take vitamin D3, 5000 as well. Like that’s just a staple. It’s a tiny little capsule so that’s easy to take. But I wanted to share my really like heavy hitters that I see really makes an impact. I will say the vitamin D3, 5000. I went to my GYN and she says, wow, she looked at my lab, she said, I really want your levels of vitamin D. This is amazing. Right. So she was, she was jealous and really wanting to know how I did it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:38]:
But yeah, you got to take your supplements. Let’s see, what advice would you give to somebody who feels overwhelmed or unsure about where to start with supplements?

Brigid McCann [00:10:54]:
That’s a great question. I would say talk to your doctor. I mean I would say number one, start with a probiotic. And like you said, doctor before, if you go into a store like Mother’s Market here we have in, you know, California or I see we got a lot of people from a lot of places. You know, any pharmacy, it’s tricky because going back to the Ultrabiotic 100 where this has a hundred billion, there’s a lot out there that just say 1 million, that’s not going to do anything to your gut at all. Like that’s not really going to move the needle you want in the billions. So look to see what else is in it. Maybe definitely look at the supplement facts to, to see what you’re putting in your body and do a little bit of research. But kind of overall look at how are you feeling? What are you feeling? Fatigued do you need help with sleep? What are your main issues that really bother and affect your day to day lifestyle? Right. And I would start there.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:12:11]:
That sounds great. I think you had some other supplements that you wanted to share with the audience.

Brigid McCann [00:12:18]:
I did. So I have those three. This one is so kind of a lot, a lot of these work synergistically as well. Right. So PC obviously the ultrabiotic is helping my gut, my gut flora. PC is also helping my gut, but it’s also helping my detoxification, my cellular repair. And to piggyback on detoxification I take try fortify liposomal glutathione. Liposomal means it’s readily available. So it’s. This is a little packet. Okay. And you just open it up and you squirt it under your tongue. You hold it there for 30 seconds and it’s going to help with detoxification. So I take this either before I go to a heated yoga class, before I teach or before I go to sauna to really help my body promote additional levels of detoxification, to really get deep into those cells to release all the gunk and the toxins that are just living in there. Because we live in a very toxic world. So you need to, you just support your body as much as possible and that’s what I feel. It really helps. It’s a beneficial product for me. Also if you’ve imbibed a little bit too much like at night or going out to dinner and you’ve had a couple glasses of wine, highly recommend putting one of these in your purse. You pop that after your drinks, you drink a lot of water and you won’t feel as horrible in the morning.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:13:54]:
Right?

Brigid McCann [00:13:54]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:13:55]:
Definitely helps support the, the liver detox for sure.

Brigid McCann [00:14:00]:
Yeah. So these are really. It comes in different forms in like a tube. Looks like kind of a toothpaste tube. But these are really handy because you can carry them with you and great for travel. The last one that. Oh wait, no, this is, this is a non negotiable in our family, in our medicine cabinet. And I would implore everyone to really take a look at this and do your research because everybody’s talking about it. It’s called, sorry, transfer factor. Transfer factor Multimune. It’s yellow bottle. It’s by Research Nutritionals, which is a phenomenal company out of Los Alos, California. Had multiple conversations with the owner. He’s brilliant. He really is in integrity and in creating phenomenal products that help support your immune system. So anytime I’m about to travel or anytime I Start to feel sick. I will take these because it helps promote healthy NK levels and TH1 and TH2 modulation, which I really don’t know. I can’t tell you what they do. That’s why we have the doctor here. All I know is that if I start to feel run down, I will take, you know, three of these twice daily and boom, I’m feeling better.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:15:22]:
Yeah, it’s an amazing product. It can be used preventatively. Preventatively. So if people have. Oh, that’s great. Thanks, Bridge. If people have recurrent viral illnesses, if they tend to get sick a lot, I’ll have people take one or two a day. But then, yes, as Brigid mentioned, it’s fantastic for when you start to get sick. In fact, the owner of the company was telling us in a recent visit that he made to our office that he. This. They are doing studies with it and it shows that if you take nine capsules a day, within an hour, it boosts up the NK cells and supports the immune system to really fight whatever it is that you’re dealing with. And it just knocks things out like that. So between increasing the vitamin D levels, usually I recommend between 30,000 IUs. Roughly 30,000. 20,000 to 30,000 IUs daily for 3 days only when you first start getting sick, plus a transfer factor. I can’t even tell you the last time I was sick. It’s been so helpful with the transfer factor. That’s fantastic, Bridge. And I think there was one more.

Brigid McCann [00:16:44]:
There is one more, and it is called Endocalyx Pro. So because I have. This is more preventative because I have. There’s a history of heart disease in our family. I really want to be proactive in ensuring that my vascular health is supported as best possible. And. And this came out a couple years ago. And.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:17:14]:
Yeah, we started carrying a couple years ago.

Brigid McCann [00:17:16]:
We started carrying a couple years ago. And doctor actually runs tests to see. And you can see the evidence, right, where people. Both the before and after they start taking it. And I need to actually do my test again and show the after. So. But it’s phenomenal. And this has been one of our top sellers because people see evidence base, right? They’re like, wow, this is absolutely incredible. So my goal is longevity and health span. So I want to ensure that when I’m. If I. When I’m 80, when I’m 80, 85, that I’m having a full, healthy life, right? That I have a health span, not just lifespan, because you can live till you’re 90, but your quality of life might not be so great. Right. That’s why I lift weights, I do yoga, I meditate, I walk on a regular basis. Even if it’s five minutes around the block, the girls will see me leave, I’ll be like, I’m be back going outside, just getting my steps in. And I support, I, you know, you know, healthy whole foods, right. So gluten free, dairy free diet. But I shop the produce section and eat healthy organic proteins and I support that lifestyle with these supplements and it’s made all the difference. So it’s again, it’s the synergy, like you can’t supplement your way out of a bad diet or an unhealthy lifestyle or a sedentary lifestyle. It’s the synergistic effect of, of doing all of the things right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:19:04]:
Right. In order to be a little bit more scientific, I’m going to share this with people. So this is a cartoon of a blood vessel. And as you can see, the, the pink section here on this end, this is where all the action is happening on the blood vessel. It’s the inner lining of the blood vessel. We call this the intima or the endothelial lining. And the Endocalyx Pro that Brigitte is taking is targeting this area right here in the blood vessels. Whether those blood vessels are in the heart or in the brain or anywhere else in the body to give the area of the body the nutrients that it needs to function properly. Because what happens when we have a risk for cardiovascular disease or cerebral vascular disease? Any toxins or infections are floating in the bloodstream and they land on the blood vessel wall, that endothelium. And if there’s not enough antioxidants, nitric oxide, things like that, the toxins then will lead to an oxidative stress and inflammation. And this is where the Endocalyx is giving you the nutrients that you need to help fight that battle. Now, of course we want to live a healthy lifestyle, as Brigid was sharing, reduce our toxic burden, eat, you know, organic, pesticide free foods and do all those things, exercise so that our blood vessels are getting that, that workout. But we can supplement to help support and provide nutrients to the areas of the body that need it. So fantastic.

Alexa Thompson [00:20:57]:
Yes.

Brigid McCann [00:20:58]:
So do you want to look at some of the. I see there’s some questions about the products.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:21:05]:
Typically we do the questions after, if that’s okay. So if there are questions in the chat. No, that’s okay. If there are questions in the chat, please put them in the Q A and we’ll we’ll do a round robin, and we’ll circle back. I’d like to shift over and ask Alexa some questions and have her share with us what her routine is about.

Alexa Thompson [00:21:28]:
All right. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I’m so excited to be here and be involved. I have been working at the spring center for Dr. McCann now for two years. I’m in my third year here.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:21:41]:
That’s all I know. It feels like I’ve been here forever.

Alexa Thompson [00:21:45]:
I feel very kindred to the Spring center and the message here and what we’re doing here. Prior to the Spring Center, I was teaching yoga. I’ve always been heavily into the wellness space, and I was just really looking to get involved somewhere different in my work in regards to my work, and I just got so lucky to end up here at the Spring Center. Over my past two years here, I’ve learned so, so much. I really came in thinking I had a good knowledge of supplements and how to take them, and I thought I was kind of doing all the right things. And then just like that, I was like, wow, there is so much more that can be done, and there’s. I can actually feel so much better. And maybe what I thought was normal feelings in my body were not. They’re not normal. I don’t have to experience them. So I’ve changed quite a bit in my journey, just starting here with Dr. McCann and just learning every day. So I also have non negotiables. I’m definitely a supplement queen now. I love my supplements. I think the hardest part is being consistent. But if you can figure out your why, why am I taking these supplements? What is this for? What is it doing for me? I think once you kind of reframe your mindset, to be like, this is giving me xyz, and I need to feel that, then you can just make it into a part of your day every day, and it’s no problem. It’s not a task. It’s not something that takes all this time. It can be done like that, and you just feel amazing. So that’s been my experience so far. I mean, I don’t really rely on weighing myself and, like, focusing on the scale. But I will say, in my last two years working here, everyone in my life can see the difference in my body physically. I have lost 15, 20 pounds in the past two years here without trying to. And that is truly from my supplements and from learning what I can add into my daily life and that it’s not all about restriction. So huge, huge, huge advocate to supplementation. I think it’s just amazing.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:23:58]:
Wow. Yeah, it’s truly amazing. So, Alexa, tell us, what are your non negotiables?

Alexa Thompson [00:24:06]:
Okay, so my non negotiables. I’ll try not to be too repetitive. I do also take a couple things Bridge takes, so I’ll just show them really quick. But my daily duo. Every morning on an empty stomach, I always take my PC and my glutathione. The master antioxidant in the body is the glutathione. And then the PC is there for cellular repair. Focus, energy. I’ve noticed the biggest, biggest, biggest difference. I can tell that I’m detoxing and I know I’m doing it the right way. So I think that has a huge. A huge portion in how my health, my health journey has changed. So these are every single day. I refuse not to take them. They’re seriously amazing. So I just do a tablespoon and a packet a day. It’s so easy. I love the liquid formulations.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:24:58]:
So how do you take the liquid PC?

Alexa Thompson [00:25:01]:
Maybe I take the liquid PC I learned from you. So I do a little bit of lemon juice, and then I just put the PC in, do a quick swirl, and I toss it back. I just call it like a little wellness shot for the morning.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:13]:
Yes. A little bit of water. A little bit.

Alexa Thompson [00:25:16]:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s perfect. Yeah, it’s really perfect. It’s not too much. I was on the soft gels for a long time, but I finally was.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:25]:
Like, you know what?

Alexa Thompson [00:25:25]:
I think it’s time to upgrade. The soft gels are just a little too big, but they’re really easy. I also do the soft gels for travel because that way you can bring them with you. Otherwise. I also non negotiably take a probiotic every morning. This one is the Akkermansia from Pendulum that we carry here in the office. I just take one of these a day on an empty stomach in the morning. Probiotics have made a huge difference as far as my gut health and how I digest. I’ve really leaned into digestive enzymes when I’m having lunch or foods. I’m definitely sensitive to certain foods that were bothering me before. And I’ve noticed a huge difference just in taking a probiotic and then taking some kind of digestive enzyme. So enzylase. This is amazing. Dr. McCann put me onto this one. It’s not only an amazing digestive enzyme and probiotic, but it does have additional benefits that you would have never known about. Like if you have a couple glasses of wine and. And you take one or two of these afterwards or one before, you’re going to feel great the next day. It helps you metabolize that alcohol. And I don’t know how it does it, but I love it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:26:44]:
Yes, we don’t know how it works, but it is, it’s unique in its ability to do that. I’ve not found another digestive enzyme that does that. And digestive enzymes in general are fantastic. We actually carry other ones as well. But that’s the, that’s the secret one. That’s it helps with that alcohol metabolism somehow.

Alexa Thompson [00:27:05]:
It somehow does. Otherwise. Two non negotiables that I’ve found, not just for me, but for my boyfriend. He deals with psoriasis and a lot of different things like that. Definitely gut issues there. But these two, the anti inflammation which Dr. McCann created, this one and then the SPM active from metagenics. These are amazing, really incredible for bringing down inflammation in your body. I think all of us, because we live in a toxic world, are dealing with inflammation on a daily basis and sometimes we don’t even know what that looks like or how it feels. But for me specifically, I have a herniated disc in my spine. So I do deal with like lower back pain and discomfort kind of on a daily basis. And I just kind of one day thought, wow, I really am in pain every day. This actually isn’t how I should be feeling every day. So I started taking the SPM active and I take this used to be twice a day. Now it’s just one a day or I mean one soft gel a day. This has made a huge impact on me as far as my daily pain. I think it’s just bringing down the inflammation in the right places. But I’m so grateful for that because not waking up in pain is huge. And for my boyfriend specifically, he was in a car accident recently he’s been dealing with a hip injury, a shoulder injury, the anti inflammation. He takes this and this every single day and he swears if he does not take it, he feels the difference. He’s not taking ibuprofen, he’s not really taking anything else. Both of us are kind of opting for seeing what the supplements can do for us and it’s been amazing. So those are probably my top must have on the daily.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:29:00]:
Fantastic. Did you find that there were some supplements that you tried that didn’t stick with or were there supplements that you were taking before that? Once you started working here, you were like, oh, I, I don’t really need that or I don’t really need that.

Alexa Thompson [00:29:18]:
Definitely. Definitely. Prior to this, I was getting supplements from a couple different places and I considered them to be still high quality perhaps. But I did notice I was able to stop taking them like ashwagandha for stress relief and things like that. I just think once I got myself to a balanced place, I realized that I wasn’t stressed, my body was stressed. It was like giving me this feeling of stress, even though it wasn’t really up here where I was stressing out. So I’ve noticed my mood. I do not need any extra help when it comes to mood boosting and energy boosting anymore. Nothing that’s specifically targeted towards anything really, I think, which I think is a big deal. I feel like now I have my good umbrella and I’m just functioning optimally and I feel great. My goal this year is not to get sick. Knock on wood. But I think we’re gonna do it great.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:18]:
What is in your medicine cabinet that you take when you’re trying not to get sick?

Alexa Thompson [00:30:22]:
That’s a good question. Oh, I didn’t bring one of the supplements in here, but I. There’s a couple. I’m like, you must have them.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:31]:
I think I have. Were you Gonna do Virex Plus?

Alexa Thompson [00:30:36]:
100%? Yes. The Virex plus is awesome. I mean, since you can’t take things for viral infection, like there’s not an antibiotic and things for that, having that protection if you’re traveling all the time, if your immune system is already low or compromised, the Virex plus is huge. When I feel a tinge of getting sick, I take the Virex plus, I take your complete immune, I’ll take the transfer factor multi immune and I don’t get sick.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:08]:
Yes. So we talked about the transfer factor multi immune. Virex plus has in it a variety of different things. N acetylcysteine, astragalus, turmeric, oregano, bromelain, berberine, licorice and erythro. So it’s got a variety of different antiviral, anti inflammatory kind of biofilm busting things. So we love this. The way that it’s taken is it’s two capsules twice a day at the first sign of illness. And you can take it for as long as you need it, you know, three to five days. And usually that just kicks out the virus.

Alexa Thompson [00:31:50]:
It’s the best.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:51]:
Yeah.

Alexa Thompson [00:31:52]:
Such a good one.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:53]:
And then tell. Do you remember what’s in the complete immune? Oh, and if you don’t, that’s okay.

Alexa Thompson [00:32:01]:
I could show that There is zinc and. Oh, no.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:32:07]:
Quercetin.

Alexa Thompson [00:32:08]:
Quercetin, yes. Zinc and quercetin, yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:32:11]:
And it also has some N acetylcysteine, some vitamin D and some vitamin C. So it’s this perfect combination for viruses. It was formulated mostly for Covid because we needed a lot of zinc to block the viral replication. And you need zinc to get into the cell. And in order to do that, you need the quercetin. So the quercetin opens the hole and the zinc is able to then get into the cell and block the viral replication. Wow. It just. It works phenomenally well. And it’s this cool, bright color. It’s kind of.

Alexa Thompson [00:32:47]:
That’s always fun. You gotta keep it fun.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:32:49]:
Gotta keep it fun. Absolutely, yes. What else would you want to share about your supplement routine? Like, how did you figure out the time of day to take everything? Is there a specific routine?

Alexa Thompson [00:33:05]:
Yeah. So for me, I’m full time here at the Spring center, so I try really hard to work all my supplements in through the day. So I have a few that I take in the morning. I think when it comes to figuring out your supplement routine, you have to think about what does my day to day look like? What does my lunchtime look like? Do I get to take lunch? Do I have to buy lunch? You know, it’s really important to think about what your lifestyle is like so you can make it work for yourself. So I have empty, more like empty stomach supplements so that I can just take them right away. They’re out of my way for the day, and then I can head into work normally. Then I’ll have some kind of like small breakfast, eat something. And when I eat something is normally when I take things for inflammation, like anti inflammation, my SPM active. I’ll take my multivitamin. I take the Mito support daily. That’s from Dr. McCann. We private label it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:33:59]:
Yeah.

Alexa Thompson [00:34:00]:
The Mito support Daily is a great multivitamin to have on hand. I also take the mineral support just to support my. I know she just has them all back there. The mineral support is really excellent. We all naturally start to lose minerals now that we don’t have natural minerals in our soil, water, foods, all of that. So it’s really important to have. And then I do take my vitamin B and my vitamin Ds as well, usually in the breakfast time area. After that, I just. I love a liquid form of anything, so I’ll add collagen, electrolytes to some kind of warm drink or anything like that to get some more in through the day. I do a lot of smoothies where you can just add all your powders or something to a smoothie. Otherwise I just prioritize keeping either a little. I’m all about having a little pill. A pill case. You can get really cute ones on Amazon. It’s no problem. I like to keep some on hand with me if I go out to dinner or if I’m enjoying myself. You can still easily pop them in through the day, so I’ve noticed. I just give myself a lot of grace. I think you can’t harp so much on. Well, I couldn’t take it on an empty stomach, so I won’t take it at all. Instead, just take it, get it into your body. It’s all going to be okay. I think it’s just a learning curve and a learning process to take supplements and to figure out when and how. But you can do it. You can definitely do it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:35:33]:
Great. Thank you so much, Alexa.

Alexa Thompson [00:35:35]:
Of course, I’m happy to share.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:35:37]:
Yes. Well, we’ll come back for questions. I I had asked Julie RRN to also join us today on the webinar. Sadly, she had something come up in her life so she was not able to join us. I’ll share a little bit of other things that are kind of my non negotiables and then we’ll dive into the questions. Okay. So for years I’ve had sleep issues. I was probably mold exposed in 2004 and didn’t realize it, became horribly depressed and needed to find my way back out of that deep, dark hole I was in. And so one of the things that was most useful to me at the time was a supplement called 5 HTP or 5 Hydroxy Tryptophan. And I didn’t realize it, but I had been pretty melancholic my entire life growing up in upstate New York when it was, you know, not nice weather for most of the year. So 5HTP was a game changer. Right now I take my 5HTP in a blended sleep support supplement called Sleep Support, appropriately named. It has magnolia bark in it and I say that’s probably the primary ingredient that helps with calming the brain down. It also is a little stinky because it does have some valerian as well as passion flower, lemon balm, lavender melatonin. It has 3 milligrams of melatonin in two capsules and then L theanine. So this helps support mood, it helps with that antioxidant support with the melatonin. And it’s got multiple what we call soporific Herbs. So these are the herbs that help with sleep inducement and induction. So I love sleep support. I take it every day. I would not be the happy lovely person that I am without it. So yeah, love sleep support. My absolute non negotiable because of that 5 HTP. My newer non negotiable is another sleep supplement called Revive a Mag. We recently started carrying this after I tried it. Omg. Best magnesium ever. So it is a special kind of magnesium. It’s magnesium L threonate, which means that it crosses and gets into the brain. So it crosses that blood brain barrier and calms the brain down. This has been amazing for sleep. So those two, two capsules of revivimag, two capsules of sleep support. I also. Lithium. Not the prescription, but the supplement. Usually 1 to 5 milligrams of lithium orotate. Because the literature shows that actually people have less risk for dementia, less risk for violent crimes, less risk for mood disorders. It’s actually pretty impressive, the literature on lithium. So I take a little lithium and an antihistamine and progesterone because I’m postmenopausal and that’s my sleep cocktail that works nine and a half times out of 10. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll have a little chewable pharma Gaba that does help. So those are some of my non negotiables. Other products I’d really like to highlight for plants, patients and for our listeners, of course I take the phosphatidylcholine like Bridget and Alexa do. Complete non negotiable. That is just the most amazing stuff, I would say. It gave me my brain back after mold and lime. And it’s great for detox. It’s really just so critically important for cellular health and brain health. And let’s see what else I’ll talk about. One that you guys didn’t talk about, the Healthy Hair Formula. Healthy Hair Formula. So with this one, I looked around at all the hair formulas that were out there and I did a bunch of literature searching and figured out what are the ingredients, what are the best, most well studied ingredients, what’s out there and then created this product. And the, the reviews that we’ve gotten back from patients are just raving fans. They are so ecstatic. One of our patients who came in with some Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, she had probably little tiny eyebrows and she was missing probably the outer half, not just the outer third, but the outer half of her eyebrows. And her hair on the top of her head was very Very thin. Couple months after the healthy hair support, she’s got full eyebrows now. She doesn’t have to pencil them in anymore. And she is just ecstatic with how this has worked. It’s three to four capsules a day. It’s a decent amount of capsules, but I think once you get the hair growth back, you don’t have to take quite so many. I was playing around with thyroid and managed to make my. Make all my hair fall out. And this has been essential at getting my hair to come back in and be full and healthy again. So I do love the healthy hair formula and take that on a regular basis. So anything else that we overlooked or really need to highlight in some of the supplements that you guys love to take? Nope. Okay, I have a couple more ideas. So the other thing that magnesium is fantastic for is it’s super important for about 300 different functions in the body, including many people get constipated or have headaches or migraines when they’re not getting enough magnesium. Now, I take the Reviva mag at night for my brain, and that definitely helps with sleep. But if I’m a little constipated, I will take vital magnesium. And so vital magnesium is a different form of magnesium. It’s got citrate and glycinate and malate. And so it’s a chelated magnesium. It’s very bioavailable, which means it’s going to help for all the other reasons that we need magnesium. So, yeah, a lot of vital magnesium as well, and that’s available on the store. I think what we can do now. Oh, my goodness. We have 43 questions. We better get going on the questions. So I will read the question and then one of you can try and take the. Take the answer if you want, if you feel comfortable. If you don’t, that’s okay. I’ll do my best. Let’s see. This one might be a little bit tough, but I learned the hard way that quercetin can depress thyroid hormone. But it really helps my MCAS symptoms. Congestion in the sinuses. I take desiccated thyroid for hypothyroidism. Do all flavonoids do this? What would you suggest taking? And instead. So my thought would be you could potentially take your. Make sure that your quercetin is away from your thyroid. Some of the things that I find with patients is they’ll take the thyroid hormone and the supplements too close together. That’s one possibility. The other possibility you could try would be luteolin. So luteolin acts very similarly to quercetin, but may not have that same effect on your thyroid. Shay asked about choline and tmao. I think that the medical literature is not differentiating phosphatidylcholine and all the benefits that it has and the tmaob. I’ve looked at TMAO levels before, putting patients on phosphatidylcholine and after, and they don’t necessarily increase. So I think it has to do with gut microbiome. I think it has to do with the quality of the product. Much of the medical literature, when they’re talking about choline, they’re actually talking about soy lecithin, not phosphatidylcholine, which is really what we’re talking about with body Bios product. Okay, how about, do you have a current supplement stack that you recommend for the onset of strains for Covid? So I know you guys aren’t medical providers, but what would you take? And we’ve gone over this, but maybe just hit the highlights again. What would you take if you are starting to get sick or starting to think you might have Covid?

Alexa Thompson [00:45:18]:
I would definitely take Virex plus transfer.

Brigid McCann [00:45:22]:
Factor multimmune complete immune vitamin D5000 for three days. You would take actually 20,000 three days in a row. Increase the volume of vitamin C that you’re taking.

Alexa Thompson [00:45:43]:
Probiotics.

Brigid McCann [00:45:47]:
Course obviously in complete immune that contains quercetin and zinc. But you definitely want to hit hard with quercetin and zinc if you don’t have the complete immune because that helps to prevent the cytokine storm.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:46:04]:
Yeah. Block the viral replication. Yeah. And then they asked more of a nuanced question. What about people who have MCAs? And for people who have MCAs, many of those same things will still apply. So quercetin obviously is a mast cell stabilizer, so you can certainly take that. Vitamin D is fantastic. You can get some low histamine probiotics to take that. You may want to ramp up on your antihistamines like H1 blockers or Pepcid NH2 blocker to help with some of the cytokine storm that might happen with COVID So even if you can’t take transfer factor multi immune, there definitely are some things to do. I also often will recommend nasal sprays such as the nasal spray X Clear, which is xylitol and water that can be really helpful for breaking up the viral particles in the nose. Using mouthwashes also can help again because we want to lower the amount of viral particles when somebody coughs and they’re sick, they spew out those viral particles, then we inhale them in our noses and our mouths if we’re talking when they cough. And so all of those virus viral particles are now in our bodies. And what we want to do is get rid of them and break them up as fast as possible so that they can’t get into our cells, infect the cells and start replicating. So the more that we’re doing nasal rinses, mouthwashes, and they don’t have to be toxic chemicals, they can be things like hypochlorous acid, for example. So those are going to be helpful along with all the supplements. All right, can you create a list of what you’re discussing in the chat or follow up with an email to the participants? Yes. Barbara will create a long list. We’ll make sure that we have all them listed out. How do you take your probiotics such that the microbes are not killed in the stomach? Some of the probiotics have special coating on them so that they don’t get killed and then are released further down in the gastrointestinal tract. So the company that makes Master supplements, the company that makes Enzylase that Alexa mentioned as a digestive enzyme, they have a special coating on their. Their probiotics, Theralac and Trubifido, that help escort them all the way down. I think the ultrabiotic and the Ultrabiotic 100 may also have a similar, similar technology, and they’re also much higher doses. So even if some of them get killed in the gastrointestinal tract with the acid, they’re making it further down because there’s more of them. Let’s see, was one up here. When someone takes PC, do they need to take a binder later? I don’t know if either of you feel comfortable doing that or talking about that.

Brigid McCann [00:49:36]:
So I. One of the things I didn’t highlight today, I do take activated charcoal. Charcoal, which is. Yes, thank you, Alexa. It’s a very affordable. It’s probably the most affordable supplement. And I always take it away from any other supplement, any other food or drink. Right. Water. Obviously, you need to take it with water, but you want to ensure that you’re not, because it’s going to. It’s going to bind to everything and then just release it out of your system. So you want to ensure that you’re not taking it near any supplements, any other medications. I give it at least a full hour, even hour and a half.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:50:19]:
That’s great. Thank you, Bridge. So someone asked, can we discuss which of these are not appropriate if you have MCAs. I mean, many of them are appropriate for MCAs. I think each person with MAST cell activation. I have many patients with mast cell activation who can tolerate these supplements. If you’re exquisitely sensitive, you want to start with single ingredient products, things like vitamin D, even the PC. And you want to start at low doses. So rather than taking a tablespoon like Alexa, you’re going to be taking, you know, a 16th of a teaspoon or 1 64th of a teaspoon. Just because you have MCAS doesn’t mean that you can’t take things. You just have to do it slowly. Start with small doses and see how your body responds and then slowly increase things over time. That’s probably one of the most important things to think about when you’re starting a regimen. Beth O’Hara used to talk about how she would take sprinkles. She would put sprinkles of different B vitamins, B1, B2, B6, methylfolate in her. In her water and drink that. And so she’s getting teeny, teeny, tiny doses. So this is a exquisitely sensitive mast cell patient colleague of mine who, who shared a lot through Mast Cell360 about how to take supplements. And so no supplement is off the table. It’s just how much are you able to tolerate? Someone asked about creatine or BPC157. I don’t know if you ladies know anything about that or want to talk about that.

Brigid McCann [00:52:09]:
I don’t know anything about BP157, but I do take a creatine supplement. It’s in like a gel form or like a gel gummy form to enhance my strength training to build more muscle. Because I’m not going to divulge my age, but I’m close to half a century. So the more the older women get, I mean, I think you start. We start losing as women muscle mass at age 30. Right. Every year. So I am trying to boost and enhance. I have been taking. I definitely feel a difference with that. So I feel that I’m developing muscle stronger more quickly and I’m more defined, which is a nice benefit.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:52:59]:
Absolutely, yes. The research on creatine is becoming much more widely available and really points to the need that most everyone of us need it. Okay. If you’re blessed with two optimal copies of the MTHFR, do you still recommend methyl Bs? I do, absolutely. I still think that methyl Bs are important. We all need to methylate Even if you have genes that work properly, you’re still going to need to methylate because that’s part of detoxification, and we’re all exposed to lots of chemical toxins. Let’s see, Alexa, if you look through the list.

Alexa Thompson [00:53:46]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:47]:
And you see any that you want to answer. Let’s see. Somebody asked about Endocalyx Pro over Arterosil. Arterosil is another product that is supportive for the blood vessels. I think that some people are going to do well with Endocalyx Pro. Some people will do better with Arteracil, and vice versa. They’re different in their ingredients list, so you just have to see which one works better for you. And they both target the endothelial lining.

Brigid McCann [00:54:31]:
Did you already address. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Alexa.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:33]:
It’s okay.

Alexa Thompson [00:54:34]:
The one where it says, why take glutathione and PC on an empty stomach? Thought they would need to be taken with a healthy fat to absorb better. I’m no practitioner, however, I just choose to take them on an empty stomach because my. My body has no reaction to me taking them on an empty stomach. I do know that PC already does stimulate the gallbladder, so it’s stimulating you to dump bile. And to my knowledge, healthy fats also do that. So maybe I’ve created a question for myself. I thought maybe healthy fats you avoid when you take your PC, but I’m not sure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:55:16]:
Honestly, I don’t think it matters with PC if you take it with food or you take it away from food, it doesn’t matter. With the glutathione, I think most people recommend that you take it away from food and supplements so that the absorption doesn’t get interfered with. So I think that that’s why we suggest that. But at the same time. Time, I’m more interested in having people take it than having people have to make it perfect. Right. So I take it, and then I eat after that. And it may only be, you know, 10, 15 minutes between the time I take it and the time I’m actually eating something, as opposed to a half an hour, so it’s less of an issue. Whereas, as Brigid commented earlier with the. With the binders, when you’re taking charcoal, you. You really only want it to bind the toxins in your gut. You don’t want it to bind your food or your other supplements because you’re spending lots of money, hopefully, buying healthy food and, you know, taking your supplements. So you keep them far away from. From your foods.

Brigid McCann [00:56:22]:
Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:23]:
Okay.

Brigid McCann [00:56:25]:
I’m not sure if you Addressed this one, doctor, but the Marilyn asked, is glutathione recommended for those of us who are very sensitive and have MCAs? I tried a few years ago and got lightheaded. So my thought would be to suggest the readysorb go packets that we have that she can. Then she can manage how much she’s trying. So you can try a very minor amount and add it to water and just take that and see how her body reacts with that, wouldn’t you say?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:55]:
Yeah, I think that’s great advice. The other possibility is that sometimes it’s the sulfur in the glutathione. One of the building blocks of glutathione is cysteine. So N acetylcysteine. So if you find that you have problems with glutathione and N acetylcysteine, it may be that you need more molybdenum, actually. So people who are sulfur sensitive, oftentimes they need that mineral molybdenum. If you get enough molybdenum, that will adjust the genetics enough and the nutrients enough so that you can tolerate more sulfur based compounds in the glutathione. But absolutely that idea of taking small amounts and slowly increasing your dose and you know, remember when you’re dealing with MCAs, you have to identify the root causes and address those too. So if mold is driving your mcas, if you address the mold, the MCAS will. The muscles will quiet down. And that’s really important to make sure that not only are you treating your symptoms with your supplements and your medications, but you’re also addressing your nervous system with your vagus nerve and your limbic system and looking at those root causes. Any other questions that you ladies see that you want to jump in and answer?

Brigid McCann [00:58:22]:
So I can’t jump in and answer this, but what is the name of the test that you showed with the blood vessel?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:58:31]:
Oh, okay. So this is actually from Quest Diagnostics and Cleveland Heart Labs. So quest. Most people in the United States have access to quest, and they are. These are specialty cardiovascular assessments. The one in particular that’s most closely related to the endothelial lining is one called adma. But you could also ask your providers to assess a cardiac or high sensitive C reactive protein that’s an inflammatory marker. Through Cleveland Heart Labs and Quest, we can look at oxidized LDL. I think you can also order that through LabCorp. So cardiologists think that LDL is bad and we should get rid of it. We need some cholesterol. But the question is whether or not the LDL that we have is being oxidized. That’s where the problem comes in. And so these tests can assess are you having oxidative stress? Like there’s a marker called F2 isoprostane and the oxidized LDL that will tell us about oxidation, the adma or high sensitivity C reactive protein microalbumin. Those are also assessing the health of the blood vessel. And then the two ones that can also be included are LPPLA2 activity and then myeloma peroxidase. And what we’ll do is I’ll make sure to give this, this handout to Michelle and she’ll put it in the replay notes so you can have the picture and see what I’m talking about. So those two markers, the LP PLA2 activity, the myeloperoxidase, those are markers of unstable plaque. And so if those are elevated, it’s possible that there’s plaque in the blood vessels that we need to do something about. And so I think that these tests can be much more useful than just a cholesterol panel. So that’s what we were talking about.

Alexa Thompson [01:00:55]:
There is One in there, Dr. Kelly, that says if taking SPM active, should you still take your dha, epa, fish oil, or is SPM a substitute? I would say it’s not a substitute. You can definitely take them in conjunction with each other. But I don’t know if you would want to elaborate.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:14]:
No, that’s awesome. Yes, you’re absolutely right. And the, the DHA and the EPA that’s in the fish oil is converted into what we call resolvins and protectins. Those are in the SPM active. So it’s a, the anti inflammatory component of the fish oil which makes it more powerful. And you know, many people think about fish oil as being anti inflammatory and yes, that’s the case. But some people have a harder time converting the fish oil into the components that are in the SPM actives. And so rather than taking fish oil and hoping that you convert it into the resolvins and protections, you just take the SPM actives.

Alexa Thompson [01:02:04]:
Okay, cool.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:06]:
Okay.

Brigid McCann [01:02:07]:
I do see another one that says I would love to take the sleep support, but melatonin and very low doses makes me very sluggish and depressed wondering why this is. I’ll let you answer the why. But we do have the stress relief product which is very similar and has similar benefits, but it does not have the melatonin in it. So that might be a good option for you. But why is it that she would feel sluggish?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:35]:
You know, I’m not entirely sure. Some people are very sensitive to melatonin. And yeah, I think for those for whom melatonin doesn’t work for whatever reason, the sleep, the stress relief is a great alternative. And you can take it at night, you can take it in the daytime, and so that’s a great option. Melatonin is interesting. Some people are very, very sensitive and it lasts a long time in them. It may be that you make an adequate amount of melatonin and you don’t need to supplement. There could be a variety of different issues with that.

Brigid McCann [01:03:15]:
The other question from Annette, she asked, can these supplements be put in a smoothie and be effective? I do not swallow pills. I prefer liquid supplements. And if I recall correctly, we have had someone similar, someone in a similar situation actually take the capsules, take, you know, what is inside of the capsules, open them up, put them in a smoothie. Same with like the PC, you PC liquid you could have put in a smoothie.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:42]:
So yes, absolutely, you can put the PC liquid in a smoothie. And as Alexa was sharing lots of different powders.

Alexa Thompson [01:03:51]:
So this is the collagen.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:57]:
Yeah, there it is. There you go. Both Alexa and I love our pro. She powders the collagen and then we do have some gut support. So gut GI immune balance. I love it. And that goes really well in a smoothie, the PC and actually anything that you put in the PC because it is a liposome, it will enhance the absorption of those supplements into the body when you take it in a smoothie. I wouldn’t counsel. However, do not put the glutathione in your smoothie smoothie. It will not taste good. Do that separate.

Alexa Thompson [01:04:41]:
Yeah, good call.

Brigid McCann [01:04:43]:
The last one I see is, are your products gluten, whey and wheat free?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:04:47]:
Yes, yes, all of them are gluten free, dairy free. I think they’re not all vegan. Right, so the collagen protein powder is cow. It’s grass fed, grass finished cow. The GI immune balance is serum bovine derived immunoglobulin. So there’s no dairy or there’s no dairy in it, but it is derived from. From cow immunoglobulins. There’s a good question. Does the body get lazy if we take enzymes? Any. Any takers?

Brigid McCann [01:05:37]:
I’m gonna say no.

Alexa Thompson [01:05:39]:
Yeah, I would say no. I have heard things more in relation to topical things that your body can get used to it or. And that it’s not as effective, but I think supplement wise, I would say no.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:05:54]:
Yeah, I, I think that there are. It doesn’t really work like that with the digestive enzymes. The body is going to continue to make those digestive enzymes because the signals are still there, you’re still eating. And so there’s still those signals to the body. Hey, got to make digestive enzymes. Got to, you know, put them down the chute and get them to the liver and get them to the gallbladder and get them into the gastrointestinal tract. So by taking digestive enzymes, you’re not interfering at all with the signaling that the body has when you eat. Flores asked if we have natto kinase in our shop. Michelle, do we have nattokinus in our shop? I think we might. And the collagen will be added to the shop soon. So if we don’t have the link, it will be soon. If it’s. It’s not already there. I thought it might be there.

Brigid McCann [01:06:50]:
I thought it was too.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:52]:
Okay.

Brigid McCann [01:06:55]:
What can someone want to know?

Alexa Thompson [01:06:56]:
Oh, sorry.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:57]:
Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Alexa Thompson [01:06:58]:
Someone just wanted to know what a good multivitamin is. So I do just have this in here with me. This is what I take. This is what we carry mito support daily. It’s just a really excellent multivitamin to have in your house.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:12]:
And it actually has additional antioxidants. The reason that we call it mito support is because they help support the mitochondria. So things like different antioxidants, the N acetylcysteine, green tea, resveratrol. So these are things that are not typically found in your usual multivitamin and they’re there in food based doses. They’re not super high doses, but they’re there to support your mitochondria in a general multivitamin. Okay. What would be support during intense mold detox protocol? Either of you want to take that one on.

Brigid McCann [01:07:58]:
Charcoal?

Alexa Thompson [01:07:59]:
Yeah. Sauna. Yeah, sauna Detoxification. You need glutathione, PC Dang.

Brigid McCann [01:08:10]:
Mold is lots of water. Lots of water. Lemon water. Green, organic green tea.

Alexa Thompson [01:08:16]:
Right. A lot of anti inflammation. Trying to bring down that inflammatory response best you can.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:24]:
Yeah. So in actuality, the anti inflammatics is a fantastic support for mold detox because there are a variety of different enzyme pathways in the liver. Specifically glucuronidation that helps with mycotoxin detoxification, including turmeric, quercetin, resveratrol. And the, the anti inflammatics has those things in there. So it’s a Nice supportive mold detox program supplement as well. But yeah, we put all of our moldy patients on PC Glutathione binders. We do have some other binders as well. We have something called Binder plus, I think it’s in the store that is a, a fiber that helps with binding the mycotoxins in the GI tract. Yes. Sauna is super important and there’s lots, there’s lots more to do with mold.

Brigid McCann [01:09:30]:
But that, that’s a whole nother 37.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:09:36]:
Exactly.

Alexa Thompson [01:09:38]:
There is one. This is a good question for virus and illness protection for kids. At the first sign of illness, can children take the transfer factor multi immune? If so, can they, are there parameters there?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:09:57]:
I would say yeah, I would say yes. I mean it depends on the child. Right. So their capsules, I don’t know how well they’ll mix into like yogurt or applesauce or something like that. So probably old enough to take capsules and they’re, you know, they’re smaller humans so they’re not going to take six to nine capsules a day. They might take, take a couple capsules a day. But I have had kids who have had recurrent viral issues take the transfer factor preventatively and it has been just an absolute game changer for them. And then there’s nothing wrong with giving them vitamin D and vitamin C and zinc and quercetin and probiotics. So all the things that the staff members and I’ve been talking about would be okay for kids too.

Brigid McCann [01:10:54]:
Lastly, if we are, can I, can we drop in and shop supplements in person? So that’s a great question. Obviously we carry a lot of supplements and then we have our online store which Michelle has been linking to the Reviva mag and the collagen will be included when we send out the follow up the replay with all of the information that everybody’s requested with all the list of the supplements. We don’t have like a storefront. We obviously have a brick and mortar office in Costa Mesa, California and you can’t necessarily shop yourselves but if you know what you’re looking for, you can come in and purchase them directly from our office staff. You might get the opportunity to meet the lovely Alexa.

Alexa Thompson [01:11:43]:
Come and see me on a Friday. Best day to shop would be on a Friday. I would recommend coming in on a Friday. It’s a non patient day for us.

Brigid McCann [01:11:52]:
Great too.

Alexa Thompson [01:11:53]:
A little more free time in the lobby. Have a cup of tea with us. You know.

Brigid McCann [01:11:59]:
Nine to two are the hours on Fridays.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:12:03]:
Yes, that’s perfect. Let’s see. You guys have had great questions and there are so many more questions that we could talk about. And we will be sending a list of all the supplements mentioned. Many of the products I’ve private labeled, but some of them are ones as the women mentioned as we were talking that I formulated myself. And so those are unique products. You can’t buy them anywhere else like the methyl B complex, the sleep support, the stress relief, the healthy hair support. Those are all products that you can only get from the spring center because they’re not available anywhere else. We don’t have things like hormones at the in the shop or for sale in America. Those are prescription only and then into florist. Asked about the Oura ring and vagus nerve devices on the online store, in addition to the supplements, we do have a section that says products I love. And so there are links to, to some of my favorite vagus nerve devices such as the Apollo Neuro, which is a WristBand or the who List. Michelle is working on getting up Truvega and a couple of other ones. So definitely want to take a look at the products I love. And they’re not just vagus nerve devices. We have saunas and air filtration systems, water filtration system systems. You know, just really things that you can choose to live your best life. There’s a company that makes wooden kitchen utensils that I just adore. They’re so beautiful. So please check those out. I think they’re very valuable and, and they were curated for you so that you can, you don’t have to do all that research yourself. We also have, I also have a list of books as some of my favorite books that I’m recommending to patients. I don’t have an Oura ring link. You can buy that directly from the company. It’s spelled O U R A And I love my Oura ring. I find it very helpful. So feel free to, feel free to check out those products. Any other burning questions or any other things that you ladies want to share?

Brigid McCann [01:14:56]:
I don’t think so. I just hope this was helpful for people to. Yeah, we, we weren’t, you know, paid to do this other than we volunteered to do this because I think that there’s a such benefit and we work in the wellness space. Right. And we, we come to work every day because we want to help people and we want to enhance the lives of our, our patients, our community. You’re part of our community and you know the world in general. Right. So if we can share this knowledge and share our personal experience and if it’s helped make an impact in your life, we’re grateful and honored and humbled to do that. So thank you for listening.

Alexa Thompson [01:15:40]:
Yeah, I just to piggy piggyback off what Bridge said, I would say the same. I think in my time here it’s just been such a beautiful experience to see how change can be made in someone’s life through something as small as a supplement. And it’s really beautiful. So I’m happy to share. Anytime. Come and see us in the office. If you want to become a patient, give me a call. We can chat about that. But really happy to help and really happy to share everything that we’re learning. So thanks for having me as well.

Brigid McCann [01:16:10]:
And absolutely. We have a new website coming as well, so we’ve got some new offerings. So hopefully by May 1st. If not, keep checking back. We’ll send an email if you’re not on our email list. Definitely get on our email list to be alerted when the Spring center website launches with great new information. You’ll see Dr. Kelly, you’ll see all of our providers, our amazing staff. Alexa includes that. She gives you, she walks you through how to become a patient, which type of patient you want to become. So very informative. It’s modern and really fun. So interactive.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:49]:
Yes. Thank you both. That was wonderful to have you on to share your experiences. I think the participants in our community can really feel how important this is to your mission as people on the planet and how much you love what you do. So appreciate that. Yes. And if we don’t happen to have a supplement that we’ve mentioned online, we will try and get them all online. It may take us a little bit of time, so please check back. The other thing is you could also call the office and place an order or stop by. Even better, stop by. So our website is thespringcenter.com to forget the t h e the springcenter.com and that also links to the drkellymccann.com website. As Brigid mentioned, we will be having new offerings in the office itself as patients. And then just a little teaser, I will be offering a GI health program starting at the beginning of June. So you will be hearing a lot more about that. So this is the possibility for those of you who aren’t able to become patients who live at a great distance or live out of the country. I will be starting an online program with a community feature for all of us to get together and learn together and grow in our health. So I love look forward to sharing more information with you all about that. And finally, this will be recorded. You will get the replay with all of the details as we promised as well as the transcript. And that will be sometime in the early part of next week. Lastly, our next webinar will be with doctors Lynn Patrick and another doctor whose name I’m forgetting right now, Louise. And we will be talking about wildfires and what you can do to protect your health in the case of a wildfire. And I think it will be incredibly valuable. Much more science heavy but also practical because unfortunately with all of the climate change, there are so many things that are happening in our environment that we need to understand and protect ourselves. So join us. That will be in two weeks on the April 25 Friday. And so there’ll be more information. Just check your emails and we’ll see you all then. Thank you so much again for staying with us. Bye everyone.

Brigid McCann [01:19:50]:
Thank you Michelle, for moderating.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:52]:
Thank you, Michelle, for doing all that hard back end work everyone. Take care. Have a wonderful weekend. Bye bye now.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Dr. Darin Ingels on our most recent webinar. Dr. Ingels and I dove deep into the foundational concept of terrain theory, highlighting that the body’s internal environment plays a more crucial role in chronic infections than the pathogens themselves. We emphasized how factors like gut health, immune resilience, toxin exposure, emotional stress, and mindset influence whether someone gets sick and how well they recover. Dr. Ingels discussed his clinical experience with herbal therapies and shared specific natural treatments for chronic infections such as Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, Epstein-Barr, and Candida. We underscored the importance of patient individuality and the need to address underlying root causes instead of relying solely on conventional treatments like antibiotics.

We hope this webinar serves as a reminder that healing is possible through persistence, proper support, and an integrative, whole-person approach.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:03]:
Hello and welcome everyone. I am so happy to be here today with you and with our Special guest today, Dr. Darren Ingalls, who is a friend and colleague and just an amazing practitioner. I’m so excited for you to learn from him today and to hang out with us and hear what questions you have and try and give you as much information as we can in the time that we have. So a few housekeeping details before I introduce Dr. Darren. Today’s webinar will be recorded. We will send the replay sometime next week along with the transcripts. And additionally, we have another webinar next week. I know it’s a little quick to go back to back, but next week’s webinar will be full engagement in our interactive with a practitioner who does something called Brain Gym, which should be really engaging and interesting. It’s a way to engage the body in healing and I’ll talk more about that. But what I would like to do is really dive in to today’s topic, which is infections and Lyme disease, and let’s let Darren teach us all about it. So the other thing I would love for people to do while you’re we’re getting started is tell us in the chat where you’re from and how you found us because it’s so much fun to see where people are coming in from. We’ve had people from all over the globe and who knew that the reach was so broad. Very exciting. Okay, so not only is Darren, my dear friend, a neighbor, and I’m actually sitting in his office today doing this webinar. He is a licensed naturopathic doctor. He is an author, international speaker and a leading authority on Lyme disease. He’s a former Lyme patient who overcame his own three year battle with Lyme after having failed conventional treatment and became progressively debilitated. So he found that proper diet, lifestyle management, natural therapies worked with his body instead of against it and he was able to heal. And then he applied what he learned about diet lifestyle management to his own patients and found that they recovered faster and had less side effects. He subsequently was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and continues to use the same tools managing his symptoms to control his Ms. And now he’s treated thousands of patients with chronic illness using his novel approach. Many who have gone on to live healthy, symptom free lives. How cool is that, everyone? So exciting. I love it. Okay, so let’s talk about breaking that cycle. So let’s talk about some of these infections. What are they and how do people get them? Let’s dive in.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:03:19]:
Well, you know, I think maybe we should start with sort of the foundational thing. You know, we. One of the things we kind of advertise for this is talking about, you know, germ theory versus terrain theory. And, you know, if you go back in the days of Lewis Pasteur, who, you know, believed that, you know, germs were the cause of illness and was really one of the first ones to start putting things under a microscope and observing these little critters that they identified causing disease. You know, I think this is where we, we have a little bit of a departure from our conventional medicine colleagues, because germ theory teaches, you know, that germs are bad. If you get exposed, this germ, this germ will cause some element of illness, and it’s inevitable that if you catch the germ, you’re going to get sick. And terrain theory says, well, you know, if you look around and consider that your body is literally 90% germ, you know, you have, you have considerably more microbial cells in your body than you have human cells. So you’re, you’re really 90% microbe and about 10% you. So if you think about it, all these germs that are in your gut, on your skin, in your. No, throat, your lungs, they’re really here to protect us. They’re not here to harm us. So it’s. Now, there are some germs that can cause toxins. Salmonella shigella, food poisoning. You know, those are a little bit different. But if you look at a lot of these bacteria and viruses and fungi and even parasites, you know, they’re not toxin producing. Most of them aren’t. So, you know, why does one person get a cold when they get exposed to a rhinovirus and other person gets no symptoms at all? And I think, you know, coming out of the pandemic, you know, that was a good example where we saw, if we agree that at any one point in time that virus was kind of the same. We had dramatically different reactions to the virus. Some people got a minor cold sniffle, some people were really tired and bedridden, and other people died. You know, we had this, this big reaction. So what is the difference? Well, the difference is the terrain. And terrain theory says, you know, it is everything in and about you that dictates how your body reacts to that germ. So terrain is looking at gut health, it’s looking at metabolic health, it’s looking at immune health. It’s all the things you do in your life between, you know, the kind of food you Eat what you’re putting in your body for fuel. How much sleep are you getting? You know, do you move your body? So, you know, when you and I are talking to our patients, you know, we’re always having this conversation about, you know, what are the things that you do in your life to keep your body healthy. Because a healthy person in general will get sick occasionally, but they’ll recover fairly quickly without a lot of consequences. So I think, you know, we need to start moving away from this idea that germs are bad. And, you know, our body has a capacity to heal. Our body has a wisdom that’s built into our DNA to know, handle, handle these microbes, even for the ones that might come outside of our body. And I think we kind of segue that into something like Lyme disease. You know, again, we see quite a bit of variation in how Lyme affects patients. And again, if you believe it’s just about the infection, then you should be able to do courses of antibiotics within a reasonable time frame, and that should be the end of that. But we see that that’s not the case in a lot of our Lyme patients, is that we know that 20% of people from the get go are resistant to antibiotics. These organisms are already resistant to the treatment before you even get started. So, again, what is it about, you know, our immune system? What is about these organisms that, you know, our body isn’t identifying in necessarily the right way? So I think, you know, when we start looking at the foundations of health, you know, we really got to start with these very basic things on gut health, nutrition, immune health, sleep, lifestyle, medicine. All of that really, I think, allows the body to operate in the way it’s supposed to, to help manage all these germs that are on the outside.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:07:27]:
Absolutely. Hear, hear. You know, and, and that’s, again, that’s what we’re talking about with our patients every day. You know, a lot of people come in and they’re like, oh, I’m so stressed out. I’m so stressed. And, and I think we forget too, that we actually have a lot more control over our responses to things. So we’re talking not just about the terrain of the physical body, but the terrain of our emotions, our thoughts, our beliefs, our. Our mental habits. How is it that we talk to ourselves? You know, if we’re constantly saying, well, work is bad and this is going on, and this is stressing me out, and this is stressing me out, and putting the, the emphasis on the locus of control outside of ourselves, we forget that in Actuality, it’s our respons, those circumstances that we do have control over. And even in the midst of difficult things, sometimes that’s where we find the most resilience. And when we’re talking about susceptibility to chronic illness, all of those things are in play.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:08:45]:
Right, Right. Well, you know, I think the other thing to consider, you know, I think about something like strep throat. I mean, this year has been a really bad year. I’ve seen a lot of people with strep throat. You know, strep is a part. Lot of. A lot of people’s normal flora. It’s not really a foreign antigen that people, you know, don’t get exposed to. So, you know, what is it that allows that strep again to become active, where you start getting the sore throat and the swollen lymph nodes and the fever and all that? And, you know, I think one of the things I see a lot in my practice, you know, there’s sort of this baseline element of allergy. And if you think about allergy, you know, most people think of allergies, they think of hay fever. You know, think of the runny nose and the itchy eyes and the sneezing. But, you know, allergy can just be that very low layer of clear fluid that gets inside your nose and your throat and your ears and your lungs. And when you’ve got that fluid there, it becomes the perfect breeding ground for other microbes to start causing infection. I see this all the time, particularly in kids, you know, recurrent ear infections, bronchitis, sinus infections. You can’t have that infection in a dry environment. You know, in a lab, if you take a bacteria and you put it on just a. A blank petri dish with no, no gel or anything that doesn’t have the right nutrients and you don’t put the right temperature, it can’t grow. So your body is a good incubator with the right temperature. And again, you put that fluid there, which gives it the right nutritional content to thrive. Again, you can selectively starve it if you start dealing with often the allergy piece. So again, as we’re talking about, you know, kind of fixing the terrain, you know. You know, it’s a lot of work that we do in our offices now. We test people, we try and find out what are your triggers. Is it something you’re eating? Is it something like mold that you’re breathing in? Are you allerg to dust or pollen? Because that constant clear fluid just again, becomes the perfect breeding ground for These different, you know, infectious agents. So again, we can, we can, you know, cut the head off a serpent if we can, you know, get to that baseline of why they’re getting sick over and over and again. A lot of it starts with just, you know, getting that allergy piece under better control.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:51]:
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I see that a lot in the practice as well. And absolutely, it’s multifactorial. So when, you know, and I’m sure you do this too, when we’re dealing with patients with chronic illness and infections like Lyme, we’re not just going after the bug. In fact, that’s probably the last thing or the least important thing that we’re doing. We’re doing so many other things to ensure that the inflammation in the body is reduced through all of these lifestyle aspects. So how else would you talk about the root causes of chronic illness? So we’ve talked about this terrain. What are some other aspects that you would want to share with the listeners?

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:11:44]:
Well, I mean, to a certain degree, genetics can play a part of this. We know that, you know, what you get from mom and dad can influence your ability to deal with various things in your environment. You know, you and I are both environmental, environmental medicine trained doctors. So again, we’re taking the sort of 30,000 foot view of what’s everything else in your environment that can undermine your body. You know, again, it could be some element of toxicity. You know, do you live in an area next to an industrial plant that, you know, puts out pollution? Do you live in farm country where they’re using a lot of pesticides and herbicides? Do you have an occupation where you’re exposed to things like lead and mercury? So, you know, we’ve got sort of this checklist that’s going on about what are all these, the outside things that you’re being exposed to that, you know, unknowingly you might not even be aware of are causing, you know, problems for you? You know, we know from research like, you know, dentists and dental hygienists, now they have the highest level of mercury, particularly back in the days when they were using amalgam fillings that contain mercury.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:12:46]:
Right.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:12:46]:
A lot of tuna, there’s a good probability you’re going to have a high mercury body burden. And that can be a problem for some people. So, you know, when we’re looking at all the various root causes, unfortunately, you know, it can be a lot of different things. And I like the fact that you talk about, it’s not just the physical factors. It’s the emotional factors that can play a role. Chronic stress, you know, is a, A, a big, big problem for a lot of people that, you know, our body was designed to handle short term stress. We’re not really great at long term stress. And it suppresses our immune system, it can alter our metabolism, it can mess with our sleep. And that may be the one biggest driving factor that keeps people sick. And of course, once you get sick, that’s stressful for various reasons. So it becomes this vicious cycle. So, you know, we kind of say, okay, how do we deal with the physical body, how do we deal with the mental, emotional body, how we deal with the spiritual body, and how do we deal with mindset? And I think that’s another big factor. And it’s certainly not my area of expertise. I know you have extra training and that part of the body, but I think recognizing that your belief system, your, your outlook, your ability to have gratitude even when you don’t feel well, all of that can be important in getting well. And so it’s, it’s sort of taking stock of your own health, being honest with yourself. You know, am I really doing everything I can do to get well? And it’s, it’s easier to say. It’s much harder to do, and particularly when you’re not well. And I know, I remember, you know, when I was in the throes of Lyme disease, you know, I mean, I was acutely sick. You know, I had a migraine headache at 105 fever. I mean, I felt horrible. And, you know, I got treated and I got better pretty quickly. But, you know, I got Lyme disease two weeks before I opened my own business. And eight months into that crazy schedule, I started to relapse. And when I was doing treatment again, I wasn’t getting better. And I just remember feeling tired to the bone. Tired to the bone where little. All I could do is kind of plop in front of the couch. It was difficult to cook and clean and just do my normal daily activities. And I also remember just having this feeling of I just didn’t care. This, didn’t care about anything. You know, sort of indifferent to life, which is just, it’s just a terrible place to be. And again, it took a lot of. It was a struggle to, you know, kind of get over that mental hurdle and forgetting that, you know, again, my body has this wisdom of knowing how to heal. There’s something that’s stopping that. And, you know, in retrospect, of course I can, I can tell you, you know, was working Long hours, really stressed, wasn’t eating well, wasn’t sleeping well. And once I kind of dialed that in, you know, it’s like, okay, now my body started to do what it’s supposed to do. When you’re in the middle of it, it’s sometimes hard to see the forest through the trees. So, you know, I think it’s again, it’s just important that we. We recognize where we’re at. But again, our body is dynamic. You know, you’re never stuck where you’re at permanently. I think there’s very few circumstances where people have truly a permanent condition. You know, there’s a lot of cases where you might be stuck there for a while. And sometimes healings, like watching grass grow, it can be very slow and very subt. But, you know, you got to celebrate the little wins. Hey, I got out of bed today. That might be a win for you. I washed my hair, I made a turkey sandwich. And it doesn’t seem like much, but, you know, this is where something like even like a gratitude journal can be helpful just to say, hey, you know, there are some good things going on. My body is shifting in the right direction. And as you kind of keep chipping away at these, these underlying factors, you know, hopefully we continue to see that, that keep going up and up. And, you know, I see this on the Internet all the time and social media. You know, we always say healing has to be this nice, straight curve where every day is just better than the day before. And it’s really more, you know, like this where, you know, you take three steps forward and a step backwards. That’s not uncommon for reasons that we don’t always understand. But I think just having the understanding that this happens, that’s sort of the nature of the beast. And, you know, healing is never linear. It often goes up and down. But, you know, over time, you know, you start to see those little increments and you keep fine tuning it. You know, this is where hopefully you’re in partnership with a good practitioner that can help give you guidance on where you need to start making those adjustments. And maybe I need to go to bed a little earlier. Maybe I need to add a little bit more protein or stay a little bit more hydrated. Or maybe I need to change something I’m taking with my supplements. But it’s just that constant fine tuning to find out again what’s unique to you to get you over the humble Amen.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:17:35]:
Amen. So there’s so many different aspects to the terrain, but I think that, you know, that’s that’s where there’s hope. And I completely agree with you. Nobody is ever stuck in one place. That’s not how life works. Right? So there’s always the opportunity. And. And even when you find yourself in a really dark place, mostly because of brain inflammation, right? So there’s brain inflammation. You feel depressed or anxious, and you just. You can’t see your way out. Sometimes it’s just a matter of time or, you know, a slight tweak, and you can start to see the sun again, start to see the possibilities. Because not only do our bodies know how to heal, I think our. Our spirit, our soul, like whatever, you know, whatever spark is inside of us wants us to heal, wants us to experience all that life has to offer. And, you know, this. This is where when I talk to patients and they’re, you know, they tell this story. And I’m sure you hear this, too. Like, you know, I went to see this doctor, and they did these tests, and they said I was fine. And I went to see this doctor, and they did some more tests, and I said I was fine. And, you know, that person says, well, I know I’m not fine. I’m anything but fine. But they keep going because they have that internal drive to find answers and to recognize that if the practitioners don’t have the answers, there is somebody out there who they. Who they can find to help them.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:19:16]:
Yeah, well, you know, we. We treat people. We don’t treat pieces of paper. I mean, all of us like to have a definitive. This is absolutely what’s causing the problem. And I mean, rarely is that the case. You know, I. I swear, the longer I practice, the dumber.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:19:30]:
I guess it’s like, amen, brother. I feel same way.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:19:34]:
It’s just that, you know, there’s so few things that give us an absolute definitive answer. I mean, Lyme is certainly one of those things where we rarely get a definitive answer. We might get clues that, yeah, you had exposure, you know, your symptoms present as such, and we treat really kind of based on that. But, I mean, I’ve been bamboozled more than once where, you know, sometimes we do blood tests and somebody has a high strep titer, and we think it’s strep. And we come to find out that, no, that was just an immune response to strep, and what’s actually causing the underlying issues actually had nothing to do with strep. So, you know, this is sort of, you know, I guess our job, our side of the desk is, no, we have to help Figure out that, you know, do the detective work and help figure out those pieces of your puzzle where things fit. And I know I’ve got some patients who, you know, they want absolute proof. I want to see this on paper. And hey, we’d love to see that too, but it doesn’t always happen that way. So, you know, our best clinical judgment based on our experience, you know, we look at the whole of you and what you’re experiencing and you know, we, we put together a plan that we think fits everything that’s going on. And you know, I think, you know, I, even though you’re a medical doctor, you know, I know you treat more like a naturopathic doctor. You know, we try to look for that low hanging fruit, what are the safest, most effective natural things we can do. And then we kind of work up the ladder from there. But, you know, it’s, it’s a process and I know how it is. It’s like, it’s very easy to get frustrated when you’re not seeing as much improvement as, as you’d like and certainly in the time frame that you’d like. And we’d all love to get people better faster and as much as we can. It’s like, look, if I thought standing on a table juggling flaming swords would get people better faster, I would do it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:21:19]:
Oh dear. Good thing that we don’t have to do that.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:21:23]:
No, no, but, but yeah, it’s just, well, you know, and just as a kind of an example, I mean, this happens all the time. You know, we have a patient come in, we put a treatment plan together, we have our follow up, and I’ll ask a generic question, well, how are you feeling? You know, nothing’s better. Okay. Then we go through. Well, how are your headaches? Well, they’re still there, but you know, they less intense. Do they? Shorter duration? Well, okay, they used to be a nine out of ten. Okay. Well, now they’re a seven out of ten. Okay. Oh, maybe there’s a little change. Okay, well, what about your, your stomach aches? Well, yeah, guess I don’t have them as often. And you know, it’s hard to, I mean, sometimes, you know, people forget because, you know, the, the, our, our mindset is that we’re not well until we’re 100% well. And sometimes it’s hard to see that you’ve had 25 or 50% improvement in the symptoms because the symptoms still there. And it’s, it’s no one’s fault or anything. It’s just the nature of being human. I mean, we all do this. But I think, again, we have to look to see, you know, where our body is changing, because, you know, rarely is it that you go from being miserable to 100% better and really short period of time, particularly if you’ve been sick for some period of time. So, again, we just have to recognize the nature of how the body heals. And, you know, there’s something they teach in naturopathic medical school anyway, called Herring’s law of cure. And Constantine Herring, who’s a doctor, I don’t know, 500 years ago, recognized the way the body heals. And so I always think about this when we’re looking at how people are progressing. And Herring’s law of care says you heal from top to bottom, you heal from head to toe. So I expect stuff up in the head and neck to get better before something down in the feet. We heal from the inside out. I expect something internal to change before, like your skin. We heal in reverse order of symptoms. So when people start to see old symptoms come back, that’s not always a bad thing. That’s a sign that there may have been something suppressed at the time that now is starting to come out. And we want to let that come out so that the body can heal in the way that it should. And the body heals in order of importance. The body recognizes the heart, and the liver needs to heal before the skin. So if we kind of keep this framework in mind, you know, we can look over time and seeing our. Is our body headed in that right direction? Are we seeing things move, like, with skin stuff, while people come in head to toe? Eczema again. I expect eczema on the face and neck and arms to clear before the eczema on their toes and their feet. And inevitably, that’s kind of what happens. There’s that one patch on the top of their foot. That’s the last thing to go. I’m like. But. Right. But it tells me that body is moving in the direction it’s designed to do. So, you know, it’s just a nice kind of quick framework to think about your body and the healing process. Again, are things moving in the right direction? So when the feet clear up with eczema and then the face breaks out, that worries me. That tells me that we’ve done something that’s moving the body in the wrong direction and we need to shift gears.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:24:15]:
Very cool. Yeah, they don’t teach that in medical school. Not surprising. Not surprising. Talk about healing. H. What’s that? The. The Other we saw at the American Academy of Environmental medicine, we saw Dr. Werner Vosloo speak, and he speaks about epigenetics and how I thought this was really fascinating too. The body and the cells make proteins and store up about two to three months of proteins. It’s kind of like they have their pantry, right? So when we heal and we clear out toxins that are on our genetics, and once those toxins have been removed from sitting on top of the genes, now those genes can be transcribed and translated into proteins that are normal and normal functioning, we still have two to three months of garbage proteins that we gotta get through before we can actually start utilizing those new healthy proteins. And so there is a delay in the treatment that is built in by the body. And so I think that’s also really a good understanding that there’s going to be time and there’s going to be a lag before you’re really going to see that optimal healing that you’re hoping for.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:25:48]:
Well, we see that even with people who are gluten intolerant, right? The minute you stop eating gluten, there’s a washout period before all that protein gets out of your gut. And depending on who you read, it’ll say anywhere it’s three to six months to get a hundred percent of that gluten protein out. So it’s not like, you know, you go on a gluten free diet for a week or two and people say, well, I did it for a couple weeks, I didn’t feel any better. I’m like, yeah, but it probably wasn’t long enough to get all that protein out. And, you know, conversely, there was a study done, it was years ago, where they were looking at the effect of antibiotics and what it did to the microbiome. And they were doing it in rats. Rats. They gave the rat one dose, one single dose of antibiotic. And I don’t remember which one it was. I think it was amoxicillin. But they wanted to see how long would it take for the rat gut to repopulate back to its baseline. You know, how long it took? I was shocked. Six months. Yeah. Six months from one single dose. You think about when people are on weeks, months of antibiotics, you know, how long is it going to take for your gut to get back to a, a normal, you know, baseline, or I mean, for people who are really on long term antibiotics, you know, do we wipe out things permanently that maybe don’t come back? You know, I think, you know, we’re just scratching the surface on understanding the gut microbiome. And you’ve got all these labs now that do very intricate testing. They’ll tell you every single species of bacteria and viruses and fungi they can find. But I don’t think we really know what is normal. And it’s interesting. I was. I was having a conversation with Dr. Vincent Pedre in New York, and he was in. I think it was Tanzania, and there’s a tribe there that their entire diet is some root that they pull out of the ground. It’s. It’s kind of like there’s a berry they have that’s a clear berry. It’s not a flat, you know, like a dark purple, like blueberry. And then they. They. Whatever they can kill. So very, very limited diet. But when they studied their microbiome, they had a way more diverse microbiome than the standard Westerner, who eats much more diverse foods than this tribe. So it’s not always about the diversity of food. I think it’s about the quality of the food that probably drives your diversity. And in that tribe, one of the things that’s really interesting is that one of their normal flora bacteria was treponema, which is the organism that causes syphilis. And interestingly, they found they need that bacteria to digest the tuber they eat. So our body adapts, you know, to our environment. It adapts to the kind of foods we’re eating. And I think you and I would both agree that certainly in Western culture, the quality of food, certainly in the U.S. relative to Europe, I mean, it’s much, much worse. And I think that is a big driver behind a lot of chronic illness is that, you know, I think people who are trying to eat as healthy and as well as possible, it’s hard in the U.S. you know, is organic food really organic? Does it have traces of glyphosate and other chemicals in it? You know, they did a study here in California during the pandemic where they were looking at red wine, and even the organic red wine had glyphosate, had Roundup in it, because it’s in now the groundwater. So even an organic farmer that’s doing everything right from the top, you know, because their neighbor, you know, 20 miles down the road, uses a lot of pesticides. It gets in the groundwater and eventually seeps into their crop. So it’s. It’s become a big challenge, certainly, for Americans on being able to have access to good, clean, organic, quality food. But, you know, I think, again, it just kind of speaks that when we talk about impacts of the environment on Health. You know, this is just one of those things too that we’re having to, you know, kind of overcome to make sure we’re nutritionally sound, make sure that our gut health is, you know, as good as it can be. And again, we’ve got these factors sometimes kind of working against us.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:29:47]:
Yes. And on top of that, you know, you go to the grocery store and everything’s wrapped in plastic. So if you don’t make it to the farmer’s market, you’re, you’re a lot of your food’s gonna be wrapped in plastic, which is a huge, huge problem. And then all of the, and then if you’re not eating a healthy diet, of course all of those things are damaging the microbiome. We know that the plastics and the microplastics and sweeteners, all those artificial sweeteners are horrific for our gut microbiome. But I think what I like to encourage people to think about is you just do the best that you can, right. And I, we having this information is invaluable and yet I don’t want you to get stressed out about being perfect either. So there really has to be like a Maybe we’ll say 9010 rule, right? Do your best 90% of the time and then do your best to let go when you might not be able to make the healthiest choice, but just do your best. And because I think that, that striving for perfection can be equally anxiety provoking and dangerous for people too.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:31:10]:
Yeah. And I was talking to another doctor last year and we were talking a lot about food, you know, because there’s just, we talk so much about diet and food and how important it is, and we recognize that. But you know, because food in particular is a, it’s a social, social thing. It can be a very joyous thing. And there is a certain joy of having certain kinds of foods when you’re with friends and you’re on vacation. And I think sometimes the. And I didn’t really think of it this way, but it really kind of dawned on me when she said it. She’s like, you know, to take away people’s joy sometimes is more detrimental than letting them have the piece of cake or whatever it is. And I’m like, you know, you’re right. It’s like if you say if you’re doing, doing good 90% of the time, you give your that 10 grace to just enjoy the joy of whatever it is. I think sometimes that can be really good for your mental emotional state to be able say, you know, I don’t have to confine myself to this little box. And then every now and then I can step outside and it’s going to be okay. And I think that’s, that, that’s the reality is that our body is, again, it’s adaptable. It knows how to handle these little bits here and there and can kind of get through it in most cases. So, I mean, if you’re a full blown, you know, diabetic, I don’t know that eating a bunch of cake would be a great idea. But I mean, barring that, I think, you know, allowing yourself to experience joy in different ways, you know, you have to give your permission that that’s okay from time to time. It’s not a regular thing and it’s. It might be special events, but I remember, I can’t remember the show with Marie Kondo, you know, where she would go to people’s homes and help them clean up all their mess, and then she says, you know, hold it and say, does it spark joy? And I think, you know, it’s, it’s a common problem when people have been sick for a while, they forget to have joy in their lives, life. And, you know, I remember again, having to deal with lime. You know, I intentionally would find things just to make me laugh. It’s like I needed to get out of my head space. And I mean, just watching stupid, funny movies for me was the thing. You know, for some people, it might be music, it might be art, it might be getting out and getting sunshine. It might be a walk in the beach or going to the mountains. You know, you’ve got to find that thing for you that sparks that element of joy. Because again, it’s so easy sometimes to get sucked into not feeling great that again, you just don’t give yourself time or permission to have a little bit of joy in your life.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:33:30]:
Absolutely. Joy is, is our birthright. Okay, let’s talk a little bit more about the specific infections. Sure. Borrelia, bartonella, Babesia, ehrlichiana, Plasma rickettsia. Let’s break them down a little bit bit for people. Maybe hit the highlights of how you talk to patients about these infections.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:33:55]:
Well, yeah, the laundry list you just rattled off, you know, Borrelia burgdorferi primarily is the cause of Lyme disease. It’s, it’s mostly transmitted through a tick bite. And unfortunately, these ticks are really kind of all over the country now. We used to think it was kind of a New England, Midwest thing, and now we know that the east and the west coast of the United States are loaded with these ticks. Ticks are the size of a poppy seed. Most people have no idea they got bit. And they also have an anesthetic in their jaw. So when they bite you, you have no idea. But these symptoms can be insidious. Some people get acutely sick, like I did more often. Not people just over time start to notice. They feel more tired, they feel headache, joint pain, they get numbness and tingling, they get brain fog, they get moody, they get depressed. And, you know, ticks that carry Lyme can carry other organisms like Bartonella, like babesia, anaplasma, or lykia. And there’s a lot of overlap in the kind of symptoms that they cause. You know, I mean, classic Lyme disease, you know, this bullseye rash that kind of looks like the target logo, which the CDC says, you know, 60 to 80% of people get that rash. In reality, it’s probably less, less than 10%. So if someone has the rash, we absolutely know you have exposure. But more often than not, people don’t have that. And migratory joint pain, where, you know, one day my right shoulder hurts, then my left knee, then my right ankle. Those two symptoms are very classic to Lyme. Everything else can be associated with other types of infectious agents, particularly from a tick bite. You know, Bartonella, we tend to think about, you know, getting these. They look like stretch marks on your body that have nothing to do with weight changes. That’s unique to Bartonella. Bartonella also very much likes your blood vessels. So we tend to get a lot of vascular issues burning in the soles of the feet. So kind of a classic Bartonella symptom. Babesia is a blood parasite which is a cousin of malaria. So you can get almost like light malaria symptoms where you can get cyclical fever, you can kind of get this throbbing, pounding headache, particularly in the front of your head. This thing we call air hunger, where you just feel like you’re not getting a deep breath and you don’t have any history of asthma or bronchit or any of those kind of lung issues. You know, anaplasma or lycia, you know, again, can be fatigue and joint pain, and both of those can infect your white blood cells. And sometimes when you do a blood test, you’ll notice that your white count is low. And again, there’s kind of a slew of other, you know, tick borne illnesses that, you know, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and things like that. But, you know, again, there’s a lot of clinical overlap. So when we’re testing people we’re not usually just testing for Lyme disease. We’re usually testing depending on where you live in the world, world things that might be common to your area to rule that out. Mycoplasma, I think is another big one. Mycoplasma, we associate causing walking pneumonia. These are people that are sick. You feel the congestion in your lungs, you can still breathe, but you’re coughing and hacking and you go to work, but you’re kind of miserable and you know a lot of infectious. These doctors will tell you that mycoplasma is a self limiting disease you’re sick of for a week or two and it just kind of goes away on its own. But there are some people where it goes on to become more persistent. And mycoplasma has been associated with causing a lot of different autoimmune problems. It’s associated with causing uveitis, which is a swelling in your eye. It’s associated with arthritis, can cause terrible joint pain. So sometimes people don’t get the classic walking pneumonia symptoms and will actually start to get other, you know, rheumatic and, you know, sometimes neurological symptoms. Just kind of a note because I know it’s timely. In the news, there was a case that came up of a child that died in Texas where they said the child died from measles. The child did not die from measles. The child died from mycoplasma pneumonia and unfortunately was treated with the incorrect antibiotics. And it was really a medical, a medical error unfortunately led to that child’s death. But, but yeah, mycoplasma can unfortunately be problematic like that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:37:59]:
And we can test mycoplasma in a commercial lab.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:38:02]:
Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:38:03]:
However, we can only test mycoplasma pneumonia. And as with many of these organisms, they have cousins. So we can’t test some of those other variations, unfortunately.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:38:17]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, other infections, you know, strep throat, I mean, strep is a very common one. Again, strep. A lot of people are carriers of strep. So when there is strep, that can cause the run of the mill sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, fever. However, it is a major cause for neuropsychiatric problems, particularly in children. So there’s a condition called pans, which is pediatric acute nonsense neuropsychiatric syndrome. We used to call it pandas. Now it’s been shortened to pans. So Dr. Sue Suedo, who’s a researcher at the NIH, is the one who kind of coined this term. And initially we thought STREP was the only organism that had this capacity. So what happens is when you get exposed to strep for some people was their immune system tries to attack the strep, it accidentally starts attacking the brain and you start getting all these different types of neurological symptoms. So it can be anxiety, ocd. We can start to see ticks, you know, twitches and you know, vocal tics and making noises.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:39:18]:
Those other ticks, not, not the little insect ticks.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:39:21]:
Not the insect ticks. Yeah, these are T I C, not T I C K. So that’s sort of the classic pans things. We’ll see behavior problems. And it happens almost overnight where my child was doing great and all of a sudden they have these, you know, they’re terribly fearful, they don’t want to go to school. And we see all the ticks and that’s sort of classic pans. We can see it in adults as well. We don’t call it pans. I mean, technically it’s a type of encephalitis, it’s a type of swelling in the brain. But strep often is a major driver. And I should mention that, you know, Lyme disease can do that too. So women, we see kids who are again all of a sudden having these behavior changes and they’re now doing poorly in school. You know, I’m testing for Lyme and tick borne illness. I’m testing for strep because those can be very common. I think Candida is another very common infection we see which is a type of yeast infection. And again, Candida is part of our normal flora and lives in our mucous membranes and even on our skin. So when we start to get overgrowth, you know, classic sort of candida. Of course, women can get vaginal yeast infections sometimes. We’ll see what we call thrush, which looks like this thick white coating on your tongue and every time you breathe it smells like sourdough bread. And that often will fall on the heels when people have been on antibiotics. When you start killing off a lot of your normal flora, that will dispose to allowing the yeast in your body to overgrow. It can come on the heels of being on steroid medication, particularly at high doses. And so, you know, often we’ll use different types of antifungal therapy to, to do that. So if someone has a yeast problem, a Candida problem, antibiotics are not the solution. Antibiotics only kill bacteria, they don’t kill yeast. So you need a different type of treatment approach which is using antifungal medication.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:41:06]:
Yes, and I’d like to jump in and also say, many of my patients who are mold exposed also tend to have yeast overgrowth. It’s, you know, if you’re in a moldy environment, there is often yeast there too. And then the yeast will overgrow on the person or in. The person could be in. I’ve seen it in the bladder. I’ve seen it in the sinuses and the nose, of course, orally, or even in the esophagus. Or if they have sifo, small intestinal fungal overgrowth. You know, it. It usually points back to this idea that there. There’s a mold issue in that. In that environment.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:41:47]:
Yeah. And then we got different types of viral infections. And, you know, I think of the. You know, we kind of classify them as the herpes viruses and herpes viruses as a class. There’s a lot of them. So herpes simplex, these are the cold sores you can get on your mouth. And sometimes in the general areas, we’ve got Epstein Barr virus, which is the primary driver of mononucleosis or mono. And typically we see that in, you know, younger children, teenagers, you can get reactivation of mono as an adult. There’s other viruses like cytomegalovirus, human herpes 6. You know, I think I have a different take on the viral thing than a lot of other doctors. The viruses in my world are almost never the problem. They are the result of something else. So this idea of being able to kill the virus. And again, these viruses are. They’re not really living things. They’re not like bacteria. They. They’re packets of protein. So when there’s a virus that’s allowed to thrive, there’s. Well, there is. There’s something else that’s allowing that virus again to be active. So the idea that we’re just going to give antivirals and kill the virus, that doesn’t generally work great in most cases. So it’s sort of what else is going on with the person that has allowed that virus to become proactive. So again, I think we’re kind of coming back to the things we talked about earlier. All these foundational things with gut health and diet, diet and sleep and stress, because those are usually the circumstances that allow the virus to become active again. And if we take care of those pieces, the virus kind of gets back into its normal steady state without having to do more. So it’s a little bit different. I mean, if you get shingles, which is a. A version of chickenpox virus, I mean, definitely want to intervene because it can be Horribly painful. But again, I think everyone I’ve ever seen who have shingles always falls on the heels of having some very strong stressful episode in their life that again, suppresses their immune system, allows that virus to be proactive.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:43:43]:
Parasites. Before you go on, I just want to say I completely agree. I think of these viruses as really opportunistic and in many cases, oftentimes patients will have Lyme and chronic infections that are more important to the body’s prioritization or a mold exposure. And the immune system just can’t keep those things in check anymore. And so the viruses run right, you know, run crazy until you get things under control.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:44:14]:
Yeah. And I don’t think we can have this conversation without talking about parasites. So just, you know, my background, I was a clinical microbiologist before I was a doctor. I actually did parasitology for a living. And I know there’s a lot of influences out there that are posting all the time about you’ve got to do a parasite cleanse and parasites are killing you. I can tell you parasites are almost never, ever, ever the problem with your chronic health issues. And I have patients all the time send me pictures of their poop, of all the things coming out of them because they took some herbs and they did this, they had all these parasites come out. To this day, I have still yet to have a single patient who thought they had a parasite. When we actually send it into a lab lab and have it analyzed, actually have a parasite, 99.9% of the time, what’s coming in them is mucus. And again, if you didn’t know better, I mean, a lot of these, these mucus things that come out because they ball up in the intestinal tract, they come out as long strands or little flakes and they can look very parasitic, but in most cases they aren’t. You know, people that have parasitic illness usually have acute illness and it can be abdominal. And since most parasites live in the gut, it’s usually a GI issue. You, it’s, you know, abdominal pain and nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, blood mucus. I mean, there’s usually some symptoms like that. And again, with the technology we have now with PCR testing, you know, we can even pick up dead parasite. So this myth that, oh, they hide and you can’t find them, I mean, if you’re doing a three day collection, if it’s there, there’s a high probability you would pick it up if it’s true. But even if there are parasites, not all parasites are bad or pathogenic. You Know, our body actually needs parasites to help regulate the immune system. When you look at African countries as a whole where they have still a very high parasitic burden because it’s just sanitation and food and so forth, their incidence of allergy, asthma, autoimmune disease, eczema, all these is non existent. And Dr. William Parker, who’s a researcher at Duke University, has been studying certain types of parasites in Ms. Mess. And they find that, you know, these parasites actually have an immune modulating effect on the human body. We are designed to be exposed at least to certain types of parasites, but of course we do so much in our food supply because everyone’s afraid of getting sick that we don’t have exposure to these things anymore. And it has had an impact on our immune system. So again, just because, you know, even if you do a test and you find a parasite, is the parasite actually part of the problem? And interestingly, as for example, Ascaris, which is a type of round worm. Round worms, which would freak people out if they saw, you know, if you start pooping round worms, it would freak you out. They look weird, they’re ugly and they’re squiggly. But ironically, they actually rarely cause illness in humans. They’re, they’re transient in our gut. They hang out there for a bit, they eventually get pooped out. But unless they cause an obstruction in the intestinal tract or block your, your, your gallbladder, they don’t usually cause a problem. So if people saw roundworms coming out, you would think, oh my gosh, I gotta, you know, take all these anti parasitics. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But I just want to kind of plant the idea for those tuning in here that you know, again, not all parasites are bad. So you know, again, we treat people, we, we don’t just treat pieces of paper. So, you know, do you have symptoms? It’s, it’s possible you might have a parasite. Again, that’s just a transient thing. Your body will eventually eliminate it if you do no treatment at all. So just keep that in mind. But again, I just, I see this all the time on social media where people who promote this, usually they’ve got a program or a supplement to sell you and it’s not really based on truth.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:47:59]:
Yes, I agree. Okay, so since this is predominantly about Lyme and these chronic infections and I’ve got about, we’ve got about 20 minutes, let’s do brief run through of holistic therapies and then we’ll take a handful of questions.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:48:22]:
Sure. Well, again, I Think we’re talking about infection. You know, my, my primary thing is herbs. You know, what I like about herbs is that they’re much more gentle on the gastrointestinal tract. They’re less likely to disrupt your normal microbiome, but clinically they can be very effective at targeting the organism that we’re trying to eradicate. And again, if you look around the world, I mean, get outside of the US but a lot of cultures around the world have been using herbs for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I think about China and India, where herbal medicine’s been part of their medical culture for again, thousands and thousands of years. And as time has gone on, we’ve also have a biochemical understanding of what these herbs actually use. So, you know, I, I think herbs, because they’re complex too, they don’t always just target the organism, they can do other things. So a lot of the herbs we use are anti inflammatory. Some of them help promote better circulation. Some of these herbs help boost your immune system. So we can mix and match herbs in different ways to, you know, figure out what each person needs individually to, you know, start getting them over the hump and getting rid of these infections.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:49:34]:
Do you want to talk a little bit about kinds of herbs or different.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:49:38]:
So I mean, talk about Lyme and tick borne illness. So there’s a researcher at Johns Hopkins, his name’s Dr. Zhang, and they’ve actually been looking at different plant extracts and how they deal with Borrelia, how they deal with bartonell, and they deal babesia. And we find there’s a handful of herbs that kind of COVID the broad base of all of them. So one of them is called cat’s claw, goes by una de gato in Spanish. And cat’s claw has been well researched. It’s a very good antimicrobial herb. It addresses a lot of different types of microbes. It’s also a very potent anti inflammatory and immune modulator. So I was at a lecture with Dr. Lee Cowden, many of you may know him from the Lyme world, and he was talking about these herbs being keep herbs. K E E P Go. That’s a keep herb. That’s a keep herb. I’m like, I don’t understand. He’s like, well, it kills everything except people. So you have a lot of these herbs that are antibacterial, they’re antiviral, they’re antifungal, anti parasitic. So that’s a keeper. So cemento is one of those keep herbs that again, kind of covers a broad base Of a lot of things. We use a lot of one called Chinese skull cap. Chinese skull cap. Again been very well studied against these different microbes. Also very good anti inflammatory. I like one called Cryptolepis. Cryptolepis again also effective against lime or all the CO infections. Japanese knotweed, another one that’s good against Lyme and all the CO infections. And again you’ll find almost all these herbs have some element of anti inflammatory effects and sometimes they keep your platelets from sticking together so it helps improve your blood flow. Some of them help boost the immune system and even something like Cryptolepis will help break down biofilm which is kind of this thick mucusy stuff around the organism that protects it. So if you break the biofilm down it makes it easier for the herb to kill. Kill it. We use things like Banderol and Kumanda which are come from the bark of a tree that grows down in South America and Peru. We use Artemisia. Artemisia is probably one of the most well researched herbs. They use it around the world to treat malaria. So anything that treats malaria has a good chance of treating Babesia. So we use a lot of Arnesia particularly for Babesia. But again it does work against other things. And Artemisia, they’ve also studied for other things like rheumatoid arthritis. Again it’s a very potent immune modulator. You know what I like about herbs is that we’ve got plan A, B, C, D, E, F and G if we need it. You know, we just gotta have a place to start. But I use a lot of Coptis. Coptis is an herb that’s used in traditional Chinese medicine. Again it targets a lot of different things. Coptis is also an interesting herb because it helps a lot with gallbladder issues. So if I’ve got patients who have infection and they have, if we think they have any kind of gallbladder issue, Coptis works really, really well. Other herbs.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:52:23]:
Yeah, that’s a pretty great list.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:52:26]:
Yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s quite a few of them. And again it’s really about, you know, it’s not like we give everybody the whole list of everything. It’s like let’s start with maybe two or three, let’s see. I you do with this. And then we have a lot of other herbs. We use sort of a supportive therapy. So we use a lot of like Berber pinella which just helps promote better detoxification. I use one called Mapalo which helps with sort of the neurological, the brain fog and brain detoxification. We use a lot of medicinal mushrooms. We know that things like Cordyceps reishi, shiitake, these are important immune boosters and can stimulate your immune system to help your body more efficiently fight infection. We can use things like astragalus. So you can use things even like garlic. Garlic is incredibly powerful against infection. In fact, when I had Lyme disease and I saw a different Dr. Zhang, not the Dr. Zhang at Hopkins, but he’s in New York City, he gave me a very potent garlic extract and it works really well against Lyme. But I was still seeing patients and my whole office smelled like a pizzeria and I’m like, I can’t do this because you excrete garlic through your skin and your breath and it just reeked of garlic. I was offending myself so I had to stop the garlic. But garlic is very powerful and you can just incorporate garlic into your diet. A couple of cloves of garlic can be incredibly powerful and healing. So yeah, we have a lot of options with herbs.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:46]:
Yes. And I love that. Not only do we have options, but we have flexibility with dosing. So you can start out with with little teeny tiny amounts and work your way up to reduce the Herxheimer die off reactions. And that’s very powerful too. Yeah. So you’re ready to start answering some questions?

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:54:09]:
Sure. Let’s dive in.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:13]:
So this is kind of a long winded one. You can read along but I’ll read it out loud for the transcript. Stephen asked. I’ve been diagnosed with Lyme and co infections about three years ago. Tried many things including IV antibiotics with full body hypothermia, hyperthermia in Germany. Unfortunately it was not successful. Main symptoms continue to be extreme and disabling neuropsychiatric symptoms which have been life altering. I found myself increasingly reactive to more supplements, medications and treatments and health has further deteriorated. Recently been diagnosed with Babesia oticoile and wondering about your take on treating it particularly holistically. I’ve heard that this is a particularly difficult and stubborn strain to treat because it lives in fibrin nest. Do you find it to be approached differently than the other strains of Babesia or do you find it to be a big source of other neuropsychiatric and how would you approach it?

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:55:13]:
Well, Babesia specifically is a blood parasite, so I’m not familiar with it living in fibrin strains. I mean that it wouldn’t survive very long outside of a red blood cell. So all Babesia species invade the red blood cells and that’s where they kind of thrive and that’s also where they replicate. So I don’t treat any of the babesia strains differently. Again, artemisia is always one of the go to herbs for me for babesia. But babesia also responds very well to Cryptolepis, responds very well to Japanese knotweed, responds very well to Banderol Kumanda. If you haven’t tried those herbs before, that might be worth looking into. You know, I, I, I always worry about any of these infectious agents also having the capacity to trigger autoimmune problems. So we didn’t really talk about it. But you know, one of the things we do is called LDI or low dose immunotherapy which is a way to try and turn off the autoimmune reaction to the micro microbe because even if you have very low doses, a low amount of the organism in your body, that can still trigger your immune system in the wrong way. And just imagine if your immune system’s treating these bugs as allergens and not pathogens. It engages the wrong part of your immune system. So LDI can be a way to try and turn off that reaction. And particularly again for some of these neuropsychiatric symptoms. Again there’s probably some element of brain inflammation from the infection and obviously we want to try and reduce the load of the organism as much as possible. But you might look and see if you’ve got to find a practitioner that does LDI that might be beneficial.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:47]:
Yeah, I think that that would be really helpful. The other thing I would say is oftentimes what can happen too is as people realize that they’re becoming more and more sensitive, you may be developing some mast cell activation s symptoms and that may require going back and, and really turning down the reactivity of the mast cells. So something to consider and you know, as I should say this, we’re not your doctor, we don’t, we don’t have, we don’t know your full medical history. This is not considered medical advice but information to take back to your providers. And I, and I will say too, I use a lot of baloo when I am dealing with hypercoagulable states. And so even though the, the organisms are inside the red blood cells, if people do have a genetic predisposition to hypercoagulability, that can be something to look at. Let’s see, Ann is asking a question about her 21 year old son has mono, he has alarmingly elevated liver enzymes. ALT was over 600, AST was 160 something elevated proteins and globulins. A week later, after dietary changes, the liver function came down to 240 and 112. Only symptoms now occasional fatigue. What can he do to improve his immunity?

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:58:22]:
Well, you can get a form of hepatitis from Epstein Barr virus. That’s not uncommon. Liver swelling is normal. With Epstein Barr it’s self limiting again, it typically resolves on its own usually within a month or so. So I, I don’t think, I’m not too worried about that. Again, you know, mono by itself at a 21 year old it’s usually, you know, they get it, they get through it and then they’re fine. You don’t usually have to do much more on that. I mean as a general rule for helping support immune system for a really kind of any kind of infection. You know, I like the combination of vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc. These are just good general immune supportive nutrients that anybody can take and they’re often helpful, you know, for someone who’s had, you know, hepatitis. I’ll usually add in some milk thistle just as a way to help promote better liver detoxification. But yeah, you probably don’t need to do much of anything because most 21 year olds will just get it, they’ll get through it and then they’re fine.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:59:19]:
Right? Absolutely. In addition to the lifestyle basics that you can both, that you both talk about anything specific you might do to treat reactive Epstein Barr after Covid as well as high antigen to spike protein.

Dr. Darin Ingels [00:59:36]:
Well, you know, we’ve been treating a lot of long Covid people obviously since the pandemic. And you know, we’ve kind of followed a lot of the frank frontline doctors protocol. You know, Peter McCullough’s, you know, talked a lot about different things like you know, bromelain, quercetin, nattokinase, curcumin, we use a lot of that and it does seem to be helping bring spike protein down over time. I’ve actually used probably more like I said, the beluque, the lumbrokinase, the nattokinase. I think it’s more effective. It’s also a lot more expensive but, but you know, you get what you pay for. And you know I saw a lot of people after Covid have kind of reactivation of everything, Epstein Barr and Lyme. And so you know, we’ve been trying to go after kind of the spike protein and we do measure people’s spike protein antibodies which you can do through any commercial lab. And that might be a good way to gauge kind of where things are At. So the treatment probably isn’t going to be geared towards Epstein Barr. That’s the sort of the, the collateral effect of having had Covid. And again, we did see that with a lot of folks.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:00:42]:
And I mean, I think again, it may not, it may not be the Epstein Barr. Epstein bar is the opportunistic infection. So I, I do think that if the pers. If people end up with long Covid, it’s important to think about Lyme co infections, mold, some other thing that’s going to suppress the immune system. We’ll talk about where you’re based at the end. So we’ll skip that. One question. Would just getting immune markers on advanced blood work go. Oops, sorry, we’re both moving at the same time. Would go not all the way to having immune system. Let’s see. Would getting immune markers on advanced blood work go most, if not all the way to having immune system actually function and take care of the viral, bacterial, other types of infections? Why or why not?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:01:45]:
Yeah, unfortunately there, there are not any good immune function tests. There are tests we can do to measure your antibody levels that just count how much is there. We can measure your IgG, IGA, IgM, IGE, we can measure your T cells and B cells. So for people who’ve got Frank immune deficiency that you can kind of measure, but they don’t really measure function. And yeah, we just don’t unfortunately have any good commercial tests that I’m aware of anyway that actually measure function. So I don’t rely on blood tests to tell me whether your immune function is good or bad just because we don’t have that available. It’s sort of your clinical history. You know, when we hear about people who are getting sick all the time, get every cold, every flu, you know, the kid comes home every time they have a snotty nose, they seem to get what the kids get. You know, that tells us kind of how well your immune system’s functioning. So, Kelly, do you have other.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:43]:
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. So we’re looking at the antibodies. I like the Cyrex lymphocyte map because it tells me a little bit more about T1, T2th1th2 balance, which can point to is it cancer, is it mold, is it viral, is it fungal, etc. So that can sometimes be helpful. Yeah, but there’s not a whole lot that we can do to. Other than, other than the, the assessments that Darren is talking about. I mean, I will do. I will send people to immunologists if I want Deeper testing, looking at complement levels. There’s more sophisticated things that I don’t even really do as an internist that are possible. But for the most part, our patients, particularly our patients with chronic illness are not walking around with frank, profound immunodeficiency states that are textbook, that we can read about them, like to George or you know, some of the other unusual deficiencies. So we’ll move on. Okay. Why do HLAS affect susceptibility and healing capacities so much? 1 accidental corn exposure in New Zealand organic Greek Yogurt listed as 1442 cause eight hours of number eight diarrhea. And I was worried about microscopic colitis. So I think it’s about the HLA susceptibilities.

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:04:35]:
I don’t look at any of the HLA stuff. I don’t, I don’t find any good evidence that it actually relates, relates to anything. I know that’s something Richie Shoemaker talks a lot about, particularly around mold. But as far as I’m aware, that’s something he kind of made up and I don’t know that it actually translates anything clinically useful. So I don’t look at HLAs at all.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:04:57]:
Yes, I no longer do either. When I originally did 10 plus years ago, I tested every, virtually everybody in my practice and virtually everybody had some of his HLA haplotypes that were or thought to be bad. Not all the dreaded genes, but they were. Nearly everyone had something on the list. So I thought, okay, well this is pretty useless. Are there non super intense ways to effectively handle chronic lime? After the first couple of months, three to six months go by. I’ve heard many doctors say that they use long term IV protocol. And part of me wonders how much damage to the microbiome inevitably takes place and how much of that depletion of microbial species, especially the good ones, can anchor and grow to similar levels even with a heavy duty probiotic regimen. And you alluded to this.

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:05:55]:
Yeah, yeah. Like I said, you know, I, I like herbs and a lot of the herbs are in tincture form where you can literally start with one drop a day and you can titrate up slowly as you feel like you tolerate. I don’t use IV antibiotics. I never have again. I think even when you look at the research on IV antibiotics, it either shows it only works while you’re on it or it doesn’t work at all. And again, inevitably you’re probably gonna have some collateral damage to your microbiome. So, yeah, I think starting with things like herbs, where you can go in one at a time, slowly, gently. Make sure you establish tolerance. Again, like Dr. McCann was saying, with, you know, mast cell activation, if you’re a heavy mast cell person, even with herbs, you got to be a little bit careful about dosing. So you got to go in with kid gloves and just start low and slow.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:43]:
If someone has high spike antigen on testing, is there a way to determine if that indicates persistent of COVID virus or persistence of just a spike protein or the immune system stuck in an on position for some other reason, since one would call for an antiviral treatment and others wouldn’t?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:07:05]:
Well, as far as we can tell, the antibody levels are somewhat proportional to exposure to spike protein. And we now know spike protein can deposit in different tissues and stay persistent even if the virus itself is, quote, gone. So we’re not measuring necessarily the virus. There is another antibody test that looks, I think, at the nucleocapsid of SARS CoV2 that would probably tell you more about presence of virus. But the spike protein seems to be the dirty laundry that gets left off. So we’ve been using it and the research seems to suggest that it is still reflective of the presence of the protein somewhere in the body. So the goal at that point is not necessarily we’re trying to, you know, kill the virus. We’re trying to, you know, break that spike protein down so it stops kind of irritating the immune system system. And in that clinically, you know, we do see people improve.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:58]:
Okay. Is colon cancer caused by viruses and, or bacteria?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:08:08]:
You know, there’s been some illusion to some viruses being associated with colon cancer. I would say as a clinical microbiologist, by and a whole, I don’t believe so. Only in that, you know, again, a lot of these microbes are designed to be there there. They’re designed there to protect us. They’re not designed there to harm us. So, I mean, when we look at colon cancer as a whole, we’re not immediately going in and looking at what is the infection we need to treat. That’s not generally the approach. I mean, obviously your gut microbiome is important, but that’s the balance of the bacteria and the viruses and the fungi and the parasites and everything else. So, yeah, I wouldn’t think of it as necessarily that it’s an infection that’s, that’s, that’s causing it. And I’m not aware of any specific research that suggests that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:56]:
No, me neither. This is back to the parasite questions. What about the non stringy excrements, liver flukes and all the other things that can be sent out with a stool sample. Are there certain clues that one actually does have parasites?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:09:15]:
Well, the clinical features, I mean it depends on the parasite because each parasite can affect you differently. So like if you get pinworm, if your kid gets pinworm, they get an itchy, itchy butt. I mean they’re digging at their anus like there’s no tomorrow because that’s where the parasite lives. It is kind of where it lives right around that opening of the anal tissue. A lot of the other parasites, again, it’s, you know, it’s a diffuse abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, you might have change in bowel habits, it could be diarrhea, it could be constipation, gas, bloating. So often the symptoms are kind of vague. Again there are a few where like with liver flukes in particular, people will feel a fullness. Usually you know, your liver’s under the right side of your rib cage. There’s fullness, there’s pressure, there’s pain. You would usually start to see your liver enzymes go up if there was invasion. Usually two flukes will cause obstructions. So people might be jaundiced, their bilirubin would go up. So we’ll have a kind of a combination of lab tests that are off and, and clinical features. But again you can send out for all that in a stool sample. Whenever we’re testing for parasites we use through a three sample collection and not on three stools. It needs to be on three separate days. Because of the lifecycle of these organisms. You may miss it on one day, but between three days there’s a pretty good likelihood you would pick it up. And I’ve had a couple of patients where we, we thought that might be the case and we actually ended up doing, doing two different stool, two three day collections we collected over six days just to expand our time. And there’s a, a lab that you and I both use called Microgen DX that’s using next gen sequencing where again if there’s fragments of a parasite in there, we would probably pick it up with next gen sequencing which is a type of basically PCR testing. So between all that, you know you have a good probability of picking it up. But non stringy stuff, mostly it’s biofilm, mucus, sometimes it can be even cells coming from your intestinal tract. But yeah, that’s what I see most of the time when I get pictures.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:22]:
Interesting talk on the parasites. Do you ever use helminthic therapy therapeutically for autoimmune conditions or other conditions?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:11:32]:
Yeah, I’ve used hdcs, which is Hymenolepsis diminuata, which is a rat tapeworm. Rat tapeworm is only a problem if you’re a rat rat. It’s completely benign for humans. And I was mentioning Dr. Parker, that’s what his research on. His research is on hdcs for various autoimmune disease. So we’ve used it with autoimmune disease, we’ve used it with autism, and some people have had a good clinical benefit from it. I have other colleagues I have not gotten into, but they’re using whipworm, they’re using hookworm therapeutically, and again, there’s some good research that these can be beneficial for autoimmune immune disease. In fact, I was just at a conference this last weekend and one of my colleagues who’s very much into this really, really, really, really wants me to try using hookworm because again, there’s some research specifically for Ms. And hookworm you actually have to put on your skin because that’s how you get exposed. It burrows through your skin, eventually makes its way to your lungs. You cough it up in the lungs, then you swallow it and it gets in your gut and that’s where it does all its magic. My only concern with the Helman therapy is that it only works while you keep using it. It will stop working once you stop using it. So in my mind I’m like, well, if it’s not really fixing the problem permanently, what are we doing? I mean, I, I’m really interested in therapies that I think are going to move the needle permanently. But if you had someone who had really severe autoimmune disease and you know, I’ve got a patient right now who’s got rheumatoid arthritis and we’re getting to the end where we’ve exhausted a lot of resources. She’s been on every medication that hasn’t worked and we’re actually talking about trying Helman therapy with her to see if it gives her some relief. So. But yeah, I think it’s, it’s, it’s relatively safe. You know, the worst thing that happens with Helman therapy is if the helminth gets out of control, you take three days of anti parasitic medication, it kills it and you’re done. And so it’s, it’s pretty safe. But there’s some really interesting research around the world on using Helman therapy.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:27]:
Very cool. Last question and I’m. I apologize if I didn’t get to your question. So how about ldn? Low dose naltrexone Would that be useful for treatment? How would you?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:13:40]:
I use a lot of low dose naltrexone. Again, as a naturopathic doctor who doesn’t generally use a lot of medication, I’m actually a big fan of this. I’ve seen so many people really respond. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of research on it wanted. It’s very safe. They’ve even done studies in children. It’s safe in children. It’s very cost effective. I know our pharmacy here in California, three month supply is like $45. So it’s pretty cheap. So it’s affordable, it’s safe. And I find it’s a 50, 50, 50% of people get some benefit. 50% of people does absolutely nothing. You got to take it for about a three months to see the full effects of it. So it’s not a quick thing. But again, for what it cost, cost, given the safety, the efficacy, everything else, I think it’s worth a try. You know, as an immune modulator can be very helpful, which is good for any autoimmune problem. It can also help with pain management if pain is part of what people are dealing with. So I like it and yeah, use quite a bit of it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:14:36]:
Me too. Love ldn.

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:14:38]:
I just saw Olga’s question. Just because it’s fast, she says, is there any research behind drinking eight glasses of water a day? Day? There actually isn’t. This actually came from some guy who wrote a newspaper article about 100 years ago and then someone took that and started perpetuating it. So no, there’s actually no research behind eight glasses a day.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:14:58]:
One person asked, can you state the pharmacy that you use?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:15:02]:
The pharmacy we use here in California is called Healthcare Pharmacy and they’re in Tustin, California.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:07]:
Yeah, they do a wonderful job. So Dr. Darren, where are you located? Where can people find you?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:15:15]:
So I am in Laguna Hills, California and people can just go to my website which is just Darren Ingalls nd.com and I can put it here in the chat in just a second.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:28]:
Michelle can do that for you too.

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:15:30]:
Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:32]:
And I’m right up the road from Dr. Ingalls in Costa Mesa, California. So we’re both in California and Dr. Darren, you can see patients in other states as well. A couple other states, right?

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:15:48]:
Yeah, we do work with people virtually.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:50]:
Yeah. Great, wonderful. This has been such a joy and you’re an amazing wealth of information. I could just listen to you talk and I’m sure our participants could too. Just this comes out in floodgates. It’s really brilliant. So thank you so much, Dr. Ingalls, for spending your time with us. And thank you to the participants. And as Michelle is stating in the chat, the replay will be available next week along with the transcripts. And we also have another webinar next Friday. Same, actually. It’ll be at 1:00, 1 to 2:30, with Christina Boyd on Brain Gym. And you know, where you’re sweating sweats and have some room to move if you want to participate. It’ll be a fun experience to see what Brain Gym is all about. So thank you again, Dr. Darren. This has been lovely.

Dr. Darin Ingels [01:16:46]:
Oh, great. Thanks, Kelly. I appreciate it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:48]:
Bye, everyone. Bye.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host The Spring Center’s very own Lauren Layson, PA-C on our most recent webinar. We explored the vagus nerve’s crucial role in regulating stress, immune function, and overall well-being. Lauren and I discussed how chronic stress can weaken vagal tone, keeping the body stuck in fight-or-flight mode, and shared practical techniques to strengthen the vagus nerve, such as breathwork, mindfulness, movement, and specific devices like Apollo Neuro and Muse 2. Lauren introduced the polyvagal theory, explaining how different states of the nervous system impact our health, emotions, and ability to heal. Our session also covered heart rate variability as a measure of nervous system resilience and the connection between inflammation, autoimmunity, and vagus nerve function.

Lauren graciously shared her webinar slides and a corresponding handout. Thanks, Lauren!

Click here to learn more about becoming a patient at the Spring Center.

Recommended products from the conversation with Lauren:

1. AnxiaEase
2. Stress Relief

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:03]:
Okay, welcome everyone. Happy February 28th. It’s not a leap year. So today is the last day of February. Can’t believe February is already over. Wasn’t it just January 1st?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:00:17]:
Yeah, January felt really long, but yeah, I can’t believe it’s end of February. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:25]:
Yes. So today we have a wonderful treat. Very excited to have Lauren, our beautiful PA here at the Spring center share with you all about vagus nerve and how to calm that down, what it is, why it’s important, all of those good things. While we’re getting started, my assistant Michelle is in the chat. If anyone has questions and we would love to hear, where are you tuning in from? Put your city in the chat. It’s always so mind blowing to me how many people join us from all over the world. It’s very exciting. And also share what it is that you’re interested in learning about. Lauren has some slides prepared, but we have plenty of time to address people’s questions. If you have specific questions, put them in the Q and A. But tell us a little bit about yourself and, and why you’re here. Maybe even how you found us because it’s just so cool to see where everyone is from. All right, let me tell you about a little bit about Lauren. This is Lauren Lasen. She is a physician assistant. She’s been practicing for 11 years, specializing mostly in primary care, women’s health and functional medicine. Now she’s here in her training on complex chron illness and just loving it. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biological science sciences at the University of California, Irvine, right next door. And her master’s degree in physician assistant practice at ucs. I’m sorry, USC Keck School of Medicine. Her mission is to empower patients to optimize the pillars of health, nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management and connection to purpose, community and the healer within. So I just love that. Let’s see. Where do you want to start, Lauren?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:02:33]:
So I guess you could start with what is the vagus nerve?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:02:37]:
Let’s do that. I think you have some slides you want to share?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:02:40]:
Yes, yes, I’ll share that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:02:52]:
And this is a cool new aspect to Zoom where we get to see Lauren in front of her slides.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:03:01]:
That’s funny. I can’t see the slides behind me, but so we can. Yes, perfect. Okay. So the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is part of our nervous system. So I want to start there actually. Like what is the function of our nervous system? Right. Our nervous system to keep things simple. It’s there. It’s kind of like a surveillance system. And it’s there to keep our body alive and functioning and safe. And if you remember in biology, you know, the nervous system, it was divided into central nervous system. You have your brain and your spinal cord, and then you have your peripheral nervous system system, which is all the nerves. The peral nervous system is further divided into somatic nervous system and autonomic nervous system. The vagus nerve is part of the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that controls automatic functions, hence the name. So digestion, breathing, heart rate, these, these are things you have to think about when you eat. You don’t have to think about digesting your food. Right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:04:20]:
So thank goodness we have enough to do to think about digesting food.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:04:29]:
And in order for that to function optimally, you want a strong vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is part of the. Let’s see. So the autonomic nervous system is divided into sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight that maybe many of us are familiar with. And then the parasympathetic, which is your rest digest, I like to think, also restore, heal. So the vagus nerve is part of that parasympathetic nervous system in charge of rest and healing. And it’s the longest nerve in our body, if you can see. It runs from our brain. It comes down through the neck and has branches. It has a pharyngeal branch, which is the throat, laryngeal branch to our vocal cords, our lungs, our, our heart, and then all of our, most of our digestive system. So liver, stomach, small intestine. It also innervates the spleen. So yeah, what is in charge of. So speech again, breathing, digestion, heart rate. The vagus nerve has quite a big job. It’s a very unique nerve in that way because it’s the only nerve that connects to all these different organs. And also what’s interesting is, you know, this is what happens in Vegas. My boyfriend told me not to make that joke, but this is what happens. Yeah. With the Vegas, you have to. So the vagus nerve you can think about as a super. It’s a communication highway. Right. But what’s interesting is that 80% of the communication is coming from the organs. So kind of from our body. So from body to brain, so from our heart, our spleen, our digestive system, it’s sending status updates to the brain. And then 15% of that comes from the brain back to the organs themselves. So they’re in constant communication and you know, it’s 15%. You want to make sure that is strong. And then 5% controls, it sends a signal down to our throat, it controls speech, that’s a motor function. And then also there’s 1% from our ear. Why is this important? I want to talk about these organs. This webinar is how do you boost your immune system? What’s the link between the nervous system and the immune system? So each of our organs in our body actually have immune cells. We have our immune system like macrophages, T cells, B cells, essentially, they’re part of your defense system. So when they encounter a threat like a toxin or an infection, a virus or bacteria, your immune cells respond. Right. And the way they do that is through releasing inflammatory chemicals and inflammation. You know, that’s actually a good thing. It protects you. It’s when it’s in overdrive, right, that we get into trouble. Too much inflammation causes chronic disease. So you know, there was an article there, the surprising link between inflammation, heart attacks, cancers, Alzheimer’s, inflammatory bowel diseases. Too much inflammation is at the heart of many diseases. And where the vagus nerve comes into play is that 15% from the brain back to the organs it sends out. The vagus nerve sends out something called acetylcholine. I know that’s a mouthful and there won’t be a quiz on that, but acetylcholine, you can think of it as like a safety signal that the vagus nerve releases to tell the immune cells in your organs, you know, it’s okay, we don’t have to. We can down regulate the release of this inflammatory chemical. So it down regulates TNF, Alpha, IL1, IL6. So as you can see, it’s an important job, right? If inflammation is the root of diseases, we want our vagus nerve to function very well because it’s actually part of this anti inflammatory pathway. So there it is. If you see this cute little cell over on the bottom right, that’s your macrophage. That is again in every, that’s an immune cell in almost every organ in your body. And it has this little red thing that’s sticking out of it, that’s its receptor. So the vagus nerve releases acetylcholine, goes to that receptor, and then the cell quiets down. Okay, anything to add to that, Doctor? That.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:09:31]:
No, I think that all sounds really good. Yeah, I think it’s profound when we think about it, that what’s happening in our organs is communicating far more to our brain than what our brain is telling our organs. And so I think you know, you’ll. I’m sure you’ll talk about this, but one of the ways that. That this really manifests in when we’re anxious and stressed and we breathe shallowly, right? So if we’re not really using our full lung capacity because we’re anxious and we’re just breathing, breathing really fast or breathing at the, you know, the top of our lungs, that message is sending the signal to the brain, hey, danger, danger, danger. Right? So this is where what you’re going to be sharing with us is so critically important to. To shift that communication and to realize that we’re really empowered. We have the ability to govern how we breathe, which will allow us keys to calm ourselves down.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:10:41]:
Beautiful. Thank you for that. Yes. So before no conversation is complete without talking about, there’s an old model, actually of the autonomic nervous system, and there’s a new model called the polyvagal theory. The old model is that assumes that there’s one vagus nerve and it’s responsible for our rest and digest. So when we have a threat, say, you know, we’re hiking and there’s a bear, or for some of us, you know, our boss calls. Calls us into their office, or you get criticized or, you know, get in a fight with. With a loved one. I mean, there’s so many things that stress us out. You watch the news, there’s news that’s the worst.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:11:38]:
Driving in Southern California traffic. That’s pretty bad too.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:11:41]:
Yeah, that’s the worst too. Yeah, that definitely gets me into fight flight. So, you know, when you sense a danger, your body again, your nervous system wants to protect you, so you go in you. When there’s a danger, you activate the sympathetic nervous systems. You go in fight or flight. And then once the threat is gone, then you go back to parasympathetic rest and digest. And that’s thought, you know, originally, and this is what I was taught in med in PA school, was that the vagus nerve is primarily responsible for that and that it was one nerve. However, there was brilliant man by the name of Dr. Stephen Porges in the 1990s who actually discovered that the vagus nerve actually has two branches. Those are actually a third state in our autonomic nervous system. Deb Dana wrote a book and she came up with this. Explain the polyvagal theory in terms of a ladder, which I. Which I found really, really helpful because, you know, you actually have three states and there’s hybrids between the states. But to keep things simple, we’ll talk about, we’ll focus on the three states. So at the very bottom of the ladder. Let’s see, where do I want to start, the bottom or the top?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:13:04]:
I would start at the top. So the top. Yeah. Is similar to what we’ve already realized, right?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:13:10]:
Yes, it’s similar to what we realized. That’s so venture. That’s the front part of the vagus nerve. So now there’s two branches. One comes out so the. From the front of the body. And then there’s a dorsal vagal that goes toward. It’s towards the back of the body. So the. This first state, when we’re in ventral vagal, that’s when we feel safe and connected. We feel calm, we want to socialize with others. We’re creative. And in our body we feel very regulated. Our muscles are relaxed, our heart rate’s regulated. This is where healing happens in this state. I thought about the spring center. One of our types of healing happens here. But healing happens, you know, in ventral bagel and also at the spring center.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:14:07]:
Yeah, I love thinking about it as the place where we’re creative and we can connect with other people. It’s not just about being able to digest our food or rest. I mean, this is where we are when we’re connected with other people. When we’re having intercourse and sex like this. When we’re in a loving space, when we’re in the flow. Right. This is flow state. Whenever you’re doing something that you love, you go in that flow state. That’s ventral vagal. So I’m sure everyone has experienced what this feels like. And yes, you’re able to digest your food better when you’re in that state. But it’s really about. This is where we’re supposed to live. The vast majority of time is in this beautiful state where we can connect to ourselves and connect to other people.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:15:03]:
Beautiful, Beautiful. Yeah, It’s a good point. Because it’s not just activating this part of the nervous system has an effect, physiologically meaning, on our body, but also, like you’re saying, emotionally. And that also directs our behaviors, Right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:15:21]:
Yes.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:15:22]:
So the next thing. So, yeah, we’re having fun. Let’s say we’re, you know, we’re in the car. An example of the ventral. They were in your car, your loved one. You know, it’s like your first week of dating, you’re singing at the top of your lungs and everything’s great. That’s ventral vagal. And then there’s a cop behind you that, you know, the lights go out the, you know, you hear that Sound. And you’re like, whoop. And so you shift, right? You were in this, like, calm, happy state, and now you’re like, shoot, did I do something wrong? Like, I’m get. Why am I getting pulled over now? You feel changes in your body. Your heart starts to beat faster, your blood pressure raises, your muscles tense. You feel panic, fear, worry. You’re anxious. So you’ve shifted to the sympathetic activated system. And that’s a normal response. It’s a normal response to do that. It’s actually healthy to have that response because you want to be alert. The problem happens when it’s too activated. Right. So we’ll talk about that, too. Like, that too much activation of the sympathetic can lead to chronic illnesses. And we’ll talk about that. All right? And then we have the third state, which is dorsal vagal shutdown. Maybe you drove to your family’s house. You, you know, maybe there’s a family member who always. That triggers you. Or maybe it’s your mom or your dad, and you’ve had a lot of trauma there. And they say something, and then you just get into this, like, state of like, oh, I just. You know, like, you feel immobilized. Like, you can’t say anything. They’re saying stuff, but you can’t say anything back. And then you just kind of feel down and depressed and discouraged and. Yeah. Then you have low heart rate, low muscle tone. So that’s what an example psychologically. But also, if you have too much stress on the body, like. Like what happens with, like, patients who have long Covid. Sometimes they can be in that dorsal vagal shutdown, too. Like, there’s just too much in the body, and you just go into shutdown.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:17:47]:
I think another common term that people will use is they feel overwhelmed. Right. Levine, talking about this, who also addressed the. The stress response and trauma. There was a story about how he. He was watching videos of animals on the Serengeti and how when the lions would chase after the gazelle, the gazelle would freeze. Right. And then once that danger had passed, they would shake uncontrollably to diffuse that dorsal vagal shutdown that they had been experiencing. And they go off and they’re like, back into ventral vagal. Humans. Very cool. Humans don’t like to do that.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:18:55]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:18:56]:
Very uncomfortable with shaking that we can’t understand. But I think it’s really helpful to think about it. Like, this is a normal physiologic reaction that all creatures have. And sometimes we get. And we get in our own way. Yeah, I’ll let you continue more.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:19:17]:
Yeah, but yeah, no, you’re so right. But, so yeah, these are normal states and you can shift, you can move between these. You know, you don’t have to be stuck in dorsal vagal. There are ways that you can go up the ladder to sympathetic and back up to ventral vagal. And we’ll talk about that in a bit. Okay, so before we talk about how to strengthen our vagal tone. So vagal tone is the term of like how strong is your vagus nerve. Right. Basically the way I see is like poor vagal tone results from too much stress. So you’re in that sympathetic overdrive. And there’s different things that can cause chronic stress. This chronic stress response in the body. There’s psycho emotional stressors. I’ve kind of categorized them. Psycho emotional, physical, biochemical. So with the psycho emotional stressors, it can start at childhood. Right. There’s something called the adverse Childhood experience questionnaire that was, it’s a relative. It was from a study in the 1990s, I think Kaiser did this study and they had 17, 20,000 participants. And the goal was to look at is there a link between trauma and childhood and developing chronic disease later in life. And unfortunately the higher and they did the results was as your score goes higher, it’s out of 10 and we can include that. Also we’re going to probably send out a handout with some resources when we send out the replay link. So you can, if you haven’t taken that questionnaire, it’s helpful to see where you are. And there’s now also a resilience score because it’s, the thing with trauma is. Yes. You know the, there’s major trauma that can happen. But trauma as Gabor Mate, I love his definition of trauma. It’s, he says it’s not what happens outside of you but what happens inside of you as a result of something traumatic. Right. It’s, it’s that shift that happens inside. So all that to say it’s good to do to maybe helpful to know your A score as they call it. And again we’ll send out a handout on that. There’s also traumatic experiences that we experience after childhood, like a divorce, you know, that’s really stressful. Death of a loved one, violence, war. I mean there’s so many things, life is really hard. Right. And then there’s the chronic everyday stress. You know, the. For me, I think I’m guilty of this one. It’s the pressures. I stress myself out. My mom calls it self induced stress. It’s the pressure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:22:25]:
Put your hand up if you know that one. Give us a thumbs up if that sounds familiar.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:22:32]:
Exactly. So, yeah, pressures, expectations, unrealistic expectations. The news. I mentioned that earlier. And also loneliness, right? Loneliness actually is stressful in the body, and our body feels that. Right. Physical stressors, we have, you know, things. Some of these are sometimes not in our control. So, like if you get in a car accident because that vagus nerve runs through the neck, you know, if you have a head injury that can affect the vagus nerve surgeries, if you have an open heart surgery, your vagus nerve is there too, that can, that can be affected as well. And like we said shallow breathing, which probably related to when we’re really stressed, we don’t really take a big deep breath. Usually. We’re. We’re just. Yeah, it’s interesting. Whenever, you know, when I do a physical exam and I ask people to take a deep breath, the first thing they do is like, they puff out their chest. But a good deep breath actually goes to your. To your diaphragm. And we’ll. We’ll kind of go over breathing exercises later. And then we also have biochemical stressors. Just living in the world that we live in right now and all. If you live in the U.S. you know, there’s so much food and processed food, and it’s very easy to eat. A poor, poor diet and blood sugar imbalances also affect our body as well as different toxins that we’re exposed to. I’ve learned so much from Dr. McCann about all the environmental toxins, you know, from microplastics to phthalates. You know, we’re, we’re kind of, you know, some people say living swimming in a toxic soup, but that’s not to scare us. That’s just to, you know, it’s good to be aware of that so you can do things about it and reduce your toxic burden, hormonal imbalances, and chronic infections as well. Okay, so before we talk about how do we strengthen our vagus nerve, I also wanted to introduce this concept of heart rate variability, which is a measure of vagal tone. We all know about heartbeat. Heartbeat is the number of times our heart beats per minute. Usually that’s anywhere from 60 to 100. And when we’re in fight or flight, it’s probably more. But typically with heart rate, you kind of want it a little bit lower. With heart rate variability, it’s the opposite. You actually want it to be higher. Heart rate variability is the time in between the heartbeats. Right. So when we’re in sympathetic. When we’re activated, the time between heartbeats shortens. When we’re relaxed, the time between our heartbeats lengthens. And that variability, kind of, the higher the variability, that’s a good indication of how adaptable you are. How, how can you shift from fight or flight to ventral vagal, you know, more safe and connected. And so it’s, it’s a good measure. There’s the gold standard to do is to get an ECG at a doctor’s office. But, you know, we don’t do that. There’s devices as well. There’s chest strap devices. And then most people do wearables like the Apple watch or Garmin. I have an aura ring. Yeah. So I’ve researched about, like, optimal hrv. And it really actually varies. You just need to know what your HRV is. You don’t want to compare your HRV to somebody else’s, and you actually don’t want to compare HRVs between devices as well because they calculate it very differently. But I think it’s just helpful to know where you’re at. I’ll tell you. A couple years ago, before I, when I started my OURA ring, my heart rate variability was in like the low 20s, which I think is kind of low in general. But that was good for me because then I was like, okay. I made it a, you know, project to, to increase that through meditation and yoga and different practices I’ve incorporated. And it’s been encouraging to actually see my HRV is slowly going up now. It’s like in the 30s, but I still want to go higher. So, yeah, just to mention a high HRV is strong vagus tone, late HRV is weak.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:27:19]:
And I will elaborate a little bit. So it’s the beat to beat variability that, you know, we all think that our heart is beating regularly, but it’s, it’s the, the, the timing is a little bit off, so it might be love dub. Love dub, Love dub. Loved up. Not to the point where it’s irregular, but there is that, that slight, very minute differences in the beat to beat measurements. That’s what Lauren is talking about. And it, you probably couldn’t even see it on an ekg, Right. Because we’re looking at three seconds of information. And it’s not something that the, the EKG tech or even the cardiologist is looking for. They’re looking for other things when they’re looking at that. So don’t go to your college cardiologist, ask for an EPD to talk about your heart rate. Variability, because they won’t be able to help you with that. But this is where I think the devices are able to do that, because they have the computer technology to dial that in and to look at the difference in nanoseconds between those beats. And of course, if you’re doing more activities and you’re having a faster heart rate because you’re exercising and a slower heart rate because you’re meditating and you’re going to get more variability, and that’s what we’re talking about. I hope that’s helpful.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:28:59]:
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. Okay, so now what do we do? So if the vagus nerve is important in reducing inflammation and especially in our immune system, what can we do about it? So there’s different ways that we can activate it. The most powerful tool that you have now is your breath, right? So like I mentioned earlier, most of us are probably have shallow breath. We breathe through our chest. So a good actually test to do is to put your hand on your heart, one hand in your belly, and then just take a deep breath and see which hand rises more. So if it’s your heart that rises, no problem. Just try to see if you can actually direct the breath to your lower abdomen. And, you know, try to breathe through your nose and direct the breath to your lower abdomen like you’re blowing a balloon is a good way to actually also think about it. And longer exhalations also promote that parasympathetic vagus nerve response. So we can try breathing for four, inhaling for four, and then exhaling for six. Okay, so now you get a feel for that. You don’t have to do it for that long. You can do it for three to five minutes. So again, the trick is to breathe through your nose, really bring the breath down to, you know, to your lower belly. Like it’s diet. It’s called diaphragmatic breathing. And then exhaling longer than you’re inhaling is a good. Is a good practice. There’s different breath patterns. There’s box breathing. You could do 4, 4, 4, 4, 4. Inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, and then hold for 4. I mean, the purpose of it really is to just have that deeper breath. Right. I personally love four, seven, eight breathing, where you inhale for four, hold for seven, and then exhale for eight. I think this was popularized by Dr. Weil. Is that correct, Dr. McCann, who you trained with?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:52]:
Yes. 478. Dr. Weil’s breath. Yeah.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:31:57]:
Dr. Wild’s breath. Yeah, yeah. I saw that on YouTube. He recommends actually doing just four of those that it can really transform your whole physiology. So four, seven, eight, breathing four times. If you find that activating, then, you know, maybe just go back lower, like, you know, four, six or three. Inhale for three down, exhale for five seconds. Okay. Another tool is something called quick coherence technique which was developed by the HeartMath Institute. It’s this beautiful nonprofit organization who’s doing a lot of work, work on the mind body connection and really kind of, you know, promoting a very heart centered world. I forgot I wanted to do this actually in the beginning of this webinar. I want to do this at the beginning of the night, but I just jumped right in. I was ready. I wanted to do this because I was telling Dr. One of my stressors actually is public speaking. And so I felt quite dysregulated before, you know, just before this presentation. So I thought that would be a nice thing to do. But we could do it now. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:33:11]:
So.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:33:14]:
This is very simple. There’s only two steps. You’re going to focus your attention at the area of the heart and you’re going to breathe through the heart. And then I’ll cue you to kind of recall an experience where you felt when you. Where you feel like love for another person. It could be your pet, a loved one, or a happy moment, or just a feeling of calm and peace within the heart. Okay, so we can try this quick coherence technique if you want, we can close, close your eyes back again. And step one is to again focus your attention at the level of your heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area and allow the breath to go just a little bit slower and deeper. For this one, we can inhale for five, exhale for five. And the next step now is to make an attempt or recall an experience or feeling of appreciation for a pet, someone you love. Bring that feeling in of appreciation, care or you can think of a time when you are really happy. So inhaling through the heart and just focusing on a sense of that feeling. The love, the care, or just a feeling of calm and peace, the level of your heart. It. Before we come out of this, we can just send this love, care, peace out to anyone we were focusing on. When you’re ready, you can open your eyes and allow your breath to go back to its normal rhythm. Okay. Thank you for doing that with me. I feel a lot more calm. So yeah, so you could do something simple like that. That took a little bit Longer, but you could do that in 2 minutes, 3 minutes. You can adopt a meditation practice. There’s so many apps for meditation now. There’s calm Headspace. I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple more, but I’ll. I’ll include that in the. In the. The resources. But, you know, if you’re just starting off, Headspace is another one. You might want to start with an app. Okay, the next thing here is Stanley Rosenberg’s basic exercise. So one of my resources for this talk was actually this amazing book. Oh. Which we can’t see, I don’t think.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:38:05]:
In front of your face.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:38:07]:
Oh, there we go.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:38:09]:
Not too close. There you go.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:38:12]:
Stanley Rosenberg called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve. And this is a great book if you want to go dive deeper into the vagus nerve and different exercises that you can do. One thing that I didn’t really highlight, but when your vagal tone is low, you’re also more prone to pain. So there’s a lot of exercises here for migraine, neck pain, back pain. But one thing, there’s this basic exercise that I’ve been starting to do a little bit more often. It’s very simple. It takes one to two minutes. But what you do is you interweave your fingers like this and then put it behind your head. Ideally, when you do this the first time, you probably want to be lying down because you want to be relaxed. Okay, so now that we have that, we’re gonna look to the left as far as we can without straining. And what you’re waiting for is a sigh or a yawn. It takes about 30 to 60 seconds.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:39:29]:
Unless you practice it a lot, which might happen in a couple seconds.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:39:35]:
I did that this morning, and it was like five to 10 seconds. I did that. So you do that, you watch, look to the side, and then you do it on the right side. And before you do it, you can also actually test the mobility in your neck first. It’s amazing how you. You can actually see a change in your neck. So if you check the range of motion, do that exercise. Look to the left, look to the right. At the end of it, check your range of motion. Okay. That yawn and sigh is. Is a sign that your vagus nerve is activated. Vigorous gargling. Super easy thing to. To add to your regimen. You brush your teeth. You can have a glass of water. You could put salt in it, or just keep it simple. The trick is to do vigorous gargling for one to two minutes. And that actually a lot. It Is. Yeah, yeah, but I do, like, I’m doing like 30 seconds right now. You can also sing a song while you’re doing that. You can attempt gargle and sing at the same time. That might be like, have a tune. Have a tune. There’s. Have a tune. Yeah, you can gargle to a tune if that makes it more interesting for you if you want an extra challenge. And then there’s humming. So, like, you know, if you talked about the vagus nerve has these branches to your neck, your. Your throat and your vocal cords. So when you hum, you actually also stimulate that vagus nerve. So om is very popular. If you go to yoga classes. Om. And then vu also is another option. I like doing this in my. Because it’s super easy to do. I actually like doing that too. When I’m in a cold plunge, you know, if there’s nobody around, I’ll. I’ll do a hum to kind of calm my nervous system when I’m in an ice bath. Yes. A couple more here. Take five deep breaths before eating. So a lot of us are stressed at work during the day, and then we go get our food and then we sit in front of our computer and we eat.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:41:44]:
Okay, I’m guilty.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:41:46]:
Me too. I try. I try to go outside and be by a tree and eat my food on the ground. But yeah, just taking. Take five. Take five deep breaths before eating. Because, yeah, if you’re in a fight or flight, then how are you going to digest your food? Right. No wonder we can’t. You know, we have all these gi issues, right. So we need to get into the rest and digest state and so that we can eat, process our food properly. Also, if you’re, you know, have a spiritual practice, that’s why we pray before eating, you know, and I think developing gratitude for the food where it came from, like, that could be a little mini meditation too. Sometimes we just take our food for granted. But, like, so much kindness went into that food, right? From the people who grew it to the people who drove it to the store. And, you know, maybe someone prepared it for you too. So there’s just so much, you know, you could be. There could be a nice ritual around food.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:42:42]:
Absolutely, yeah.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:42:44]:
And then, yeah, these are fun ones. Dancing to your favorite song, Dancing in general, laughter, yoga. Probably good to do this more in a group.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:42:56]:
Stretching with us when we’re laughing.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:42:58]:
Yeah, yeah, stretching. Cold therapy. Cold therapy is an interesting one. I’m terrified. I was always terrified of the cold. I was the person who never went in the Pool or in the beach. I was like, it’s way too cold, way too cold.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:43:16]:
I grew up in upstate New York, and every winter there was a winter carnival. And there were, gosh, the polar. I think they called themselves the polar bears. And they would go into the lake, they would have to cut out places of ice, you know, so that they could actually get into the water. And I thought that that was most crazy thing I had ever heard. And of course, this is in the 80s, you know, way before cold plunges. Popular, but hip.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:43:48]:
Wow. So ahead of the curve.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:43:51]:
Yeah.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:43:52]:
Yeah. That’s great. Cold therapy. Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s kind of like you’re choosing to put your body in a stressful situation and you build resilience by, you know, breathing through it. So you kind of have to prepare yourself before you get into the cold plunge. You have to know what you’re going to do with your mind and just kind of like, you know, really signal to the body like, we’re okay, we’re going to breathe through it because your body’s going to freak out. I did my first cold punch last night. Summer. It was a really hot day. And what helped me, actually was I was surrounded by many of my friends and they were cheering me on. And it was such a. It was such an amazing experience. Like, I got out of that. I ended up in my first cold plunge doing three minutes because they were all around me, like, cheering on, and it was 45 degrees. But that was such a teaching to me about community and how, you know, I. I could. I didn’t believe that I could do that, but my friends believed in me and it really uplifted me. And yeah, it was. I. It was just amazing. I’m. I’ll always remember that because I’ve. I felt like I could do anything after that. After you did your first cold plunge.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:45:10]:
Yeah. That’s a great story about the community and support and everything like that, that it’s so vital for our nervous systems. And you can do this yourself, too, in your shower, right?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:45:27]:
Yes. Yeah. You can end your showers with colds. You could start 15 seconds, 30 seconds. You don’t need a fancy ice bath to do this, so this is. This can be free. Also, put on your favorite song and.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:45:39]:
You dance shower, and then you get ready for that, you know, change. And. And of course, for. For people who are really hypersensitive, you know, the, the recommendations that we’re making of three to five minutes maybe it really is like five seconds or 15 seconds for you. So obviously Take the recommendations in, in into your heart and figure out, okay, what do you think that you can do? Because these practices should not be activating for you. If you’re, if you are getting activated or more sensitive with any of these practices, you’re doing too much or maybe that’s not the right practice for you at this time in your healing journey. So I just want to put in that little caveat. And please, especially if you’re sensitive, don’t do them all.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:46:32]:
Yeah, don’t do them all. No, start with one or two. Build your, you know, build up slowly. Yes. Right. A few more things here that are free. Morning, sunrise, watching the sunset. That gets you in a good circadian rhythm. I was talking to my stepmom. She. She’s very big on circadian rhythms. She’s an integrative doctor as well, and functional medicine, and just an amazing healer, energy healer. And she’s, she’s really all about, like, being in touch with the earth, the rhythms of the earth and of nature. And so when you have a good circadian rhythm, you wake up in the morning and you go to sleep, you know, at night, at a decent time, you’re. You’re in rhythm with nature. So you’re not. You have harmony, right? You’re not. You don’t have disharmony, which, when you have disharmony of any kind, that causes dis. Ease, right? There’s disease. So I thought that was a nice way to look at that. So if you can, first couple hours of waking, you know, try to take a walk outside, get some sun in your eyes, because that activates something in the brain that releases cortisol, and the whole thing just balances your cortisol melatonin pattern. Okay. Very easy to do gratitude journaling or just journaling in general. Gratitude practice, as we all know, is great. It just shifts you into. Into your heart. Right. I think that heart math practice is great because I wanted to mention, I love that practice too, because it kind of shows you what your true state is when you’re in a good rhythm, when you’re in coherence, your natural state is loving. It’s grateful, it’s joy, it’s peace, it’s calm. And that’s really kind of. You know, I like to keep that in mind, that that’s our true nature. It’s there. Sometimes there’s too much chaos around us and it doesn’t feel like that, but please believe it’s there. It’s. It’s within us all. And so things like gratitude, journaling, can get you back into, you know, like your. Your true self, like the light, the love. Get. Get you back into your heart. When you’re stressed, you’re too much in your head. When you’re, you know, developing gratitude, you can be in your heart. Listening to relaxing music is another one. Prayer, reciting some mantras. And we talked about this already, like really connecting with community because loneliness, as we saw earlier, was a stressor, right? So really, you know, encouragement to find your tribe or people that you connect with and people that you feel happy around. Because that really creates a sense of safety. And when we feel safe, our bodies can heal. I think that’s another really point, important point to make is we want to encourage as much safety in our body, in our environment. So laughing. We’ve all heard laughter is the best medicine. It really is. Okay. And then just to mention some other healing modalities here. You can take yoga classes. I love restorative yoga. That’s one of my favorites. Tai chi, qigong, massage, sound baths. I mean, there’s a whole list here. Tuning forks. There’s different kinds, apparently there’s biofeel, there’s acutonics, cranial sacral therapy. If you have anxiety and mental health problems. There’s. There’s, you know, other options for therapy. I think a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy is talk therapy, but it’s. And that’s helpful to a certain extent. But it’s also nice to kind of go a little bit deeper and have more of a process to handle that. Anxiety, depression. And I personally have experienced internal family systems. It has parts work, you know, without going definitely look into that. Family constellation therapy. Can you talk a little bit about that, Doctor? Like what? That’s. Sure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:50:41]:
So it’s the way that I had experienced it was in a group. So there’s a facilitator. There is the client who is the. The. The primary person. And then there is the quantum field. You know, we used a carpet in. In the middle of a circle of people. And the participants would say there was a person who was acting as the. The primary client, right. And so that person would go stand in the middle of the carpet. And then the family members around them, their, you know, mother, father, grandparents, brother, sister, depending upon the story that the client was experiencing, those people would go in that space also. And essentially they act out based on their own intuition as to how the story unfolds. And you can see the dynamic of the people’s families and their relationship to the client in that quantum field. And you can gain Insight. So the facilitator would ask the client, Patient, the client questions, and the client would answer those questions and then watch it be played out in the quantum field by the actors or the other participants who are acting as if I had the fortune of, of participating in one of these workshops and I was the client. And it was fascinating to watch the dynamic of my grandparents and my relation, how they interacted with me without me actually giving a lot of detail. And then the woman who was playing me in that scenario, not only did she leave the quantum field, she went down the hall, like into the next room. I think was representative of me leaving my family of origin from New York and moving all the way to California to be where I am now. So it was just fascinating to watch that and, and gain insights as a 30,000 foot view. Right. So being able to witness your life being played out by other people. I’m sure that there are other, other practitioners who do it a little bit differently, but that was my experience.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:53:28]:
Wow, thank you for sharing that. That sounds very powerful. Okay. We. So other therapies you have osteopathic care, facial counter shape. These are very helpful for people who have pain. Especially sometimes you have damaged cervix nerve and you. When you’re in a sympathetic fight or flight again, your muscles tense up. Right. And over time you can have chronic pain issues. So it’s good to sometimes do some of the exercises we talked about. But sometimes you also need like a manual manipulation. Right, right. Massage and facial counterstrine. And there’s also energy healing. There’s so many healers out there, you know. Just wanted to mention that, you know, we’re all energy and. Yeah, just kind of wanted to offer that as an option. These are my favorite ways to activate the vagus nerve. I start with morning meditation. I love 4, 7, 8. Lying down on the grass, Having lunch on the grass next to a tree, Spending time with family and friends. We’re going to talk about devices when I have the good fortune. I love going on silent meditation retreats. There’s just something about being out of your normal environment and just going in and. Yeah, it’s amazing. I love yoga, dancing, cold plunge and actually tapping. I really like tapping. I don’t know, there’s emotional freedom technique tapping and there’s time thymus tapping. Actually, I wanted to mention that thymus tapping I learned from Amy Scher. So here at the Spring center we recommend a lot of books. We want to encourage people to empower themselves. And one of the books we recommend is this book by Amy Share called How to Heal Yourself when no One Else Can. And one of the techniques she uses is called thymus tapping. Like if you feel you want to let go of an emotion, like let’s say anxiety, you can actually tap at your heart. That’s where the thymus is. And you can release that emotion. And she has this practice where you release a certain emotion, then you install kind of maybe the opposite of it. So that’s really cool. That’s in her book and she has classes online and I’ll also include her as a resource for you all.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:55:45]:
And she and I did a webinar last year. So if you want to learn more about her and watch the webinar that she and I did, it’s available in the webinar library.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:55:58]:
Yay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:55:59]:
She’s awesome. I love Amy.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:56:01]:
I haven’t watched that yet. Okay, now we go to devices. So there’s actually devices that can activate your vagus nerve. Remember we had that anti inflammatory pathway. So the way this devices work is if you activate the vagus nerve, you reduce inflammation. So we have some favorites here at the spring center. Dr. McCann. I don’t know, I think we were going to do like a little show and tell.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:32]:
Yes, I have some devices to show and tell.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:56:34]:
Yeah. One of my favorite ones is the Apollo Neuro. I Learned this from Dr. McCann. You can wear it around your wrist, around your ankle. And what it does is it gives vibrations, like different vibrations to promote. To reduce stress in the body, to promote a sense of calm. And they have different options too. Like I played earlier, the focus one, so I could focus for this presentation. They have one for sleep. They have one for like a. It mimics like a. More morning coffee. So there’s different settings. So it’s kind of nice, you know, if you don’t want to do the exercises, maybe you’re not feeling well. I think the devices are a nice option because it doesn’t take long for you to feel an effect.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:57:25]:
There’s a little motor in it and so it has a vibration. And the sequence of the vibration is what constitutes the different programs. For people who are really sensitive, you might want to only start with a couple of minutes. And the settings in the, in the app that it links with on the phone, usually the shortest duration that is available is 15 minutes. But again, for those sensitive people, you might want to just stop it. Don’t do the whole 15 minutes. And you can also adjust the intensity. So if you’re not feeling anything, you can turn it up or you can keep the intensity very low if you’re sensitive. Yeah.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:58:09]:
Great. And then I. My other device is. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:58:17]:
I was going to go down the list, but.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:58:19]:
Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, no, because mine is actually in the bottom.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:58:22]:
Yeah. So then this is the Resimax. It is again, another vibration device. So if you’re sensitive to vibration that, you know, this might not be the best one for you, but it is a great device. Oops, sorry for pain. So it comes with a little end there. You probably can’t hear it, but it has a motor and there are different settings. It is quite vigorous. And then there’s another piece here where you can attach it and it can be used, you know, on your chest, on your back. It was designed by a physical therapist and his team is great at teaching patients how to use it. Many of these devices are expensive, but they do have often have money back guarantees. So don’t let that, the expense keep you from getting a device that might be helpful for you. So again, I use this a lot for pain, but you have to be okay with pretty vigorous vibration. It’s much stronger than this little motor guy. Next on the list. Are you okay if I keep going, Lauren?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [00:59:36]:
Yeah, please.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:59:37]:
Next on the list is the Muse headband. So the Muse comes in two options. They have a. This was their version one, which is a harder option, and it kind of fits like this. You can’t. I can’t wear my glasses with needs to make contact with the. The head so that it can read your brainwave patterns. The updated version is a softer version. I find it catches my hair, so I like the harder version better. And then do you want to describe how it works, Lauren, or should. Should I keep going?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:00:21]:
You can keep going. Please keep going.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:00:23]:
So typically, what happens when you link it with your phone? In that app, there is a soundscape that is playing. Let’s say, for example, it sounds like a rainstorm. And as you’re breathing and focusing your mind, when your mind is calm, as it is supposed to be, the kind of. The goal that we’re working towards is that ventral vagal parasympathetic state, the soundscape will be calm. There might be a soft pitter patter of rain, maybe you hear a couple of birds chirp. And when your mind wanders and you’re no longer in that ventral vagal, now it sounds like a thunderstorm. So it’s very easy to see how quickly we can flip back and forth. And so it’s a way to help give you biofeedback as you’re learning how to meditate. So especially if you don’t know what calm feels like. I think the Muse is a fantastic device for helping you get that feedback of what calm ventral vagal parasympathetic is supposed to feel like in the body and in the brain.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:01:47]:
Nice. I want one. They’re really fun.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:52]:
Next on the list is a little looks like a pager for those people who used pagers like me. It has two electrodes here that need to have some degree of moisture on them. And then it’s a very simple. Applies directly to the vagus nerve to produce a stimulation and you feel it like kind of a little bit of electrical shock. Again, if vibration is not your thing, this might not be the best device for you. It does, it can be a little stimulating up into the ear, but it is really quick and easy to use. So that’s, that’s an option. And I know you have a similar option. You want to go next, Lauren?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:02:42]:
Yeah. This is the Truvega. It goes in your neck as well. And again it’s a vibratory stimulation there and you want to feel like a tug here in the jaw. That means you’re activating the nerve. And I love it. It’s like two minutes, twice a day. Super simple to use. They have their parent company, the Gamma Core. They have FDA approved device for cluster headaches and migraines. So. So that’s an option?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:12]:
Yes, that’s an option. You have to get the Gamma Core, I think through a provider who is participating with Gamma Core. But you can just buy the Truvega and use that and then actually let’s.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:03:28]:
See, we have one more that I forgot to include here.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:03:31]:
Yeah, there’s one more that I’ll talk about too. And then I’ll let you take back Alex, you take back the reins. So the last one is that I have here is called the Pulsetto. Again it’s a wearable around your neck. You have to use a little like jelly or not real jelly, not edible jelly, but like aloe vera or some sort of conduit gel to create that connection. And it links to an app on the phone. And there are a variety of different programs that you can run on with this device. The nice thing about it is you’re hands free so you can go and do things again. You know, all these devices work great for some people and they don’t work for other people. Go ahead and continue explaining some of the other options.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:04:31]:
There’s heart math, which we did the technique earlier. The coherence Technique. You can. They actually have a device that connects to your ear and you can see on your app when your heart is in a abnormal, you know, pattern or when it’s incoherent. So that’s kind of nice. Biofeedback as well. There’s the website. It’s a lot. There’s a ton of resources on their website. Brain Tap, not as familiar with that. I know that was in our page.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:05:00]:
So Brain Tap is. It’s a light and sound device. It looks like a pair of goggles that you can wear over your eyes and links to an app that has meditations. And then there’s some visual stimulation, if you like that too. I think some people will just use the meditation portion of it. Some people, like my husband, didn’t care for. I think the, the eye portion didn’t fit him quite right. So just different, lots of different options out there for people.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:05:39]:
Yeah. So I think there, you know, we’ll send you a link or a handout with all these references or resources so you can check them out. And in the interest of time, I want to make sure we have, you know, time for question and Q and A. I’ll go through. So, yeah, some of these devices have been shown to help with rheumatoid arthritis, you know, Crohn’s disease. So again, inflammatory diseases, vagus nerve stimulation can, can really help. And then, so vagus nerve work, you’re working on your autonomic nervous system, but you also want to work on the brain, you know, so because they talk to each other. So there’s a part of your brain, amygdala, the limbic system, that also can be overactive. And so there are these programs that patients have found very helpful. Primal Trust is one that has limbic system and vagus nerve toning. And then I just wanted to share these other resources. Anything to add there, Dr. You know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:42]:
When people are hypersensitive, oftentimes they have an immune system hypersensitivity we will often call mast cell activation. They’ll have a disregulated autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve issues, and they’ll have limbic system activation. And in actuality, we have to address all of them. You can’t just address the vagus nerve and ignore your limbic system because the symptoms are a little bit different. With vagus nerve activation, you’re going to get more physical symptoms. They might be palpitations, irritable bowel symptoms, etc, when you have limbic system activation, that might be, that might present differently. That could be mood issues. That could be brain fog. Right. So, and then if you’re having histamine reactions, that’s going to be the mast cell component. So we have to address all of those components while you’re on your healing journey.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:07:55]:
Perfect. Thank you. So this is just more other tools that we can do. So remember that safety signal that acetylcholine, it’s actually derived from nutrients. So I just wanted to point out here that in order to make the acetylcholine, you do need B vitamins, certain nutrients, and also choline. Right. To make acetylcholine. And these are some food sources here. Egg yolks, beef liver, mushrooms. You could also do supplements. So these are supplements that are going to boost your heart rate variability, help your vagus nerve. Our favorite here at the spring center, Dr. McCann’s favorite is phosphatidylcholine, which is great to heal the cell, the cell membrane. It helps with regeneration, and it makes acetylcholine. So our favorite supplement, PC B vitamins, beetroot, potassium, omega 3, vitamin D, antioxidants. These are all great. Also wanted to share. These are some books. These are some of the books that I use to prepare. Dr. Habib has done a lot of work. Stanley Rosenberg already mentioned. Dr. Habib has done a lot of work on vagus nerve. Amy Scherer, that’s the book that we recommend. And one here that I want to highlight too is heal your body by Lewis Hay, which talks about how our body is always communicating with us. You know, our symptoms can actually be metaphors to things. Which leads me to the last point here is just mindset, right? So we’ve learned about the vagus nerve. We can learn about all these different tools, how to activate it. Like Dr. McCann said, you know, you. You want to start slow. For some people who are definitely on the sensitive side, you don’t want to do everything. You don’t want to make this. Add this again. For people who are like, type A and want to accomplish. You’re not. Okay, now I’m going to add this to my to do list. Stress yourself out further and stress out yourself even more. Yeah. So sometimes less is more. As Dr. McKenz said, if you start getting activated, you’re doing too much. There’s usually no one therapy that will make you feel better completely. And when we have symptoms in our body, it’s really an opportunity to look inside and ask, like, what is this teaching me? It’s really like disease is you’re not at ease and Something’s out of harmony, right? Something’s out of alignment. So some, you know, some of us can be like, in we. We know what the diseases, and we want to go into, like, this attack mode, like, let’s fix it right away. But true healing comes from, you know, a space of, like, acceptance of what is and also just allowing, kind of asking yourself questions, right? Like, what is this teaching me? Can I grow from this? Like, having a growth mindset is always better than having more of a fixed mindset. And really keeping in mind, you know, it’s very different to think about health, like, as a. You want to promote health rather than, like, fighting something, right? So you want to do things that are in your control that you can do to promote health. These are some questions you can ask yourself, do I view myself as holding me back? So this is like, in relation to your, you know, what’s going on in the body. You really want to be an active participator in your healing. So you can ask yourself, am I capable of and willing to step up to the challenge? Am I willing to let go of prior beliefs in the face of new information? Am I willing to use new information I gained to make real changes in my life and habits? And am I willing to invest the time, effort and resources in creating the life I want to live? So with healing, this is just an encouragement that, you know, here at the Spring Center, I love that it’s a partnership between the providers and the patients because really, the healing comes, I think, at the end of the day from you. Right? And some key points. Our bodies cannot heal when we are in a state of fight or flight. Our body will heal when it feels safe. Again, pick two to three from the list that resonate with you. Something that you’ll enjoy. We can learn from symptoms in our body if we allow ourselves to have a growth mindset. And yeah, ask those questions like I mentioned. And I like this quote that, you know, healing is a daily event. You can’t go somewhere to be healed. You must go inward to heal, to be healed. So that introspective aspect of healing is very important. It means a daily commitment to doing the work and being responsible for your healing and that you’ll be an active participant. That’s great. I like Nicole La Paris. She’s the holistic psychologist. She’s a great follow on Instagram. And yeah, I really do believe that the most powerful healer is within you. There’s so many things that are not that we can’t control externally, but if we can build as much resilience within through acting our vagus nerve, you know, shifting our mindsets. I think that would be very, very powerful. So thank you. I’ll end that presentation there. Beautiful.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:10]:
Thank you so much, Lauren. Great. Okay, we have a lot of questions. We have about 15 minutes, you know, and I, I do want to speak to one of the comments from Tracy, you know, about the kind of symptoms as metaphor. And you know, the, the way that I would really encourage people to look at that is it’s not my metaphor. It’s your metaphor. Right. It, you as the patient can really own this and ask yourself, what is the message that my body is trying to convey to me? What is the lesson that I am trying to learn? And yes, I understand that. You know, if, if I’m on the outside looking in and saying, okay, well, yeah, I think this is your metaphor. It can be construed as psychosomatic. And from my perspective, there’s nothing farther than the truth. I know that these are physical symptoms that are presenting. It’s more of an, of an opening of your mindset and being willing to say, what can I learn from this experience? You know, when, when patients who have had cancer talk about their experiences, oftentimes that cancer diagnosis is a wake up call for many people to say, okay, here’s this diagnosis, this thing that could possibly kill me. What am I going to do different and what is it that I need to do different so that I don’t get killed by this cancer? Right? Whereas in complex chronic illness, we’re just on this slow decline. There’s no slap in the face and say, hey, wake up. Something needs to change. Right? So that’s, that’s really what we’re, what we’re encouraging is this idea that, okay, how am I listen? How, how can I listen differently than I have been listening before? Before or even not paying attention before? How I. How can I think about my experience, think about what’s going on with my body, think about what, what I’m telling myself and shift it in a way that I can grow and learn and heal. That’s what I would encourage. So on that note, let’s answer some questions.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:15:49]:
Beautiful. Thank you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:50]:
Okay. And you can look at these two if you want, Lauren, but I will read them aloud for the transcript. Which devices are the most helpful for vagus nerve stimulation? Someone is interested in the resimax.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:16:08]:
So.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:08]:
I’ll let you answer that.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:16:11]:
Which one of the. I think it’s the one that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:14]:
Well, you know. Which one is most helpful.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:16:17]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:17]:
How would you Answer that question.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:16:21]:
I think it’s the one that you’re gonna use the most and be consistent with. Yeah, I would kind of check in to see, like. Yeah. Are you okay with vibration? Do you want something easy that you don’t have to think about? Right. You can have the watch, the Apollo Neuro. That’s just something on your wrist. That’s kind of a tricky thing to. To answer, like, which one’s the best? I think they all work as long as you use them consistently. Yeah, there’s.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:53]:
There’s no one right device for everyone. There’s no one right exercise that it’s going to get everybody better. It’s really designing your program that works for you if that’s, you know, four, seven, eight, breath twice a day and the resimax for a couple minutes twice a day and then you slowly add on from there. Okay. What happens to the chain of the nervous system functioning and by extension the immune system when using nerve blocks or when they actually snip a nerve? That’s actually a really good question.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:17:33]:
I think I’m gonna phone a friend. It’s a very good question. I can’t answer it right away.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:17:45]:
I think I’d have to defer too. But my is that, you know, part of the reason that it has to happen is that the feedback loop has gotten so dysfunctional that they’re trying. They’re trying to interrupt the feedback loop. Right. So it may alter the benefit of some of these devices, but the underlying root things that you need to do to heal will still be there because they can’t dismantle the entire nervous system. They can’t dismantle all of the connections back and forth. And the body is incredibly resilient and will find a way around these roadblocks if that’s how it’s perceiving them. Hopefully if you have had a nerve block or you’ve actually had to have a nerve cut, there were important reasons why those were done. And it may give you enough bandwidth to heal from. Right. So we don’t have that dysfunctional loop happening anymore. How would one use vagus stimulation to decrease autoimmunity? You guys are asking wonderful questions.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:19:12]:
Yeah, yeah. So autoimmunity, usually you have a hyperactive response like your immune system is responding to, you know, a trigger, and it’s a little. But then in autoimmune, your immune system’s a little confused and instead of defending you, it attacks you. And I think I mentioned earlier with autoimmune conditions, one of the basic, one of the Things that causes it is too much inflammation. Right. So if you do vagus stimulation, again through that acetylcholine, the cholinergic anti inflammatory pathway, you can quiet the hyperreactivity of the immune system, you can reduce inflammation and in that way help autoimmunity. Inflammatory bowel disease is one of them. Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis. I think I showed earlier there was a study that if you do vagus nerve stimulation, it reduces inflammation. And Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, which is huge because usually those conditions are treated with a lot of biologics and steroids and just kind of hefty drugs that can be hard on the body.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:20]:
Right. Of the 80% of the communication coming from all the organs, which ones have the majority share other than the gut?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:20:31]:
That’s great. I think that actually of the 80%, a lot of it is from the gut because it’s the largest of them all. But I actually don’t know which one would be the second. I don’t know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:43]:
I would think the heart and the lungs would make up the other majority, frankly. But, you know, I don’t know. Which supplements would you say are the most supportive of the vagus nerve?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:20:56]:
You. And over that, the phosphatidylcholine, omega 3s, B vitamins, magnesium, electrolytes, those are all great to support.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:05]:
And you know, kind of along the same lines, what are the other ways to increase acetylcholine?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:21:10]:
We can get that in our diet through, like beef.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:15]:
Eggs.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:21:16]:
Eggs? Eggs have a lot of choline. Yeah. Shiitake mushrooms.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:23]:
What is the most supportive to the nerves? Directly and indirectly? I think this was a follow up from Michael’s first question. So which supplements are the most supportive to the vagus nerve? Which SM are most supportive directly and indirectly? Exactly. I’m not sure if I can differentiate those. I mean, so when you’re talking about nerves, we could talk about myelin. So we could talk about plasmalogens in terms of myelin support, which would be, you know, these sorts of things. Whoops, you can’t really see it because of the light. Here we go. Those would be more direct to help the nerves. There probably are some other more direct herbal nerve tonic type herbs that I don’t have in my head right now. Could you both speak on how more serious diseases involving the nervous system, like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and other examples, to what extent the vagus nerve malfunctions and whether more advanced stages are there, natural therapies that can recoup those losses in the whole body nerve functioning. Okay. Yes. So basically it’s how much recovery can we get in, in a patient whose nervous system has been significantly involved by doing natural therapies. Do you want to take.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:23:19]:
Yeah, I believe that, you know, there’s radical healing that’s possible, but I think there’s, it’ll be a combination of things that you would need to do in order to heal for, you know, from something like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s. There’s everything that we talked about, the devices, the exercises and, and then I think really like our belief systems as well, like taking a look at that and our relationships with other people too, in essence, like, you know, doing as much as you can to promote that safety that’s needed for, for healing in the body.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:24:13]:
Initially and, and recognizing too that, you know, some damage has been done. So I, I agree with Lauren. I think, you know, radical, radical healing, radical transformation is always possible and, and yet realistically, it may not happen. There are plenty of people who have had radical experiences. I think about Anita Moorjani and her near death experience where she had metastatic lymphoma, not Hodgkin’s lymphoma, died, well, essentially was in a coma, was on death’s door and had a near death experience and came back and all traces of her cancer was gone. That’s absolutely profound. And you know, she’s gone on to speak at length about that. You can look her up, you can read her books. It’s profound. So there are cases where these transformational healing experiences can happen. And you know, she would never say that she was anybody special. Right. So. And yet they often are not the experience that most people have. So I think will and, and your heart and what you want in your life, those are critically important things that will play a role. And it all helps. Right? Eating clean helps. Breathing clean air helps. Drinking clean water helps. Having a healing vibration where you’re, you’re in tune with your heart on a regular basis. All of this helps. Okay, we have just a few minutes left. Are you familiar with the Dr. Navio’s cell danger response? If so, I’m wondering how the sympathetic dorsal vagal states connect with those of cell dangerous stages. So I don’t know if you want to take that one on.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:26:30]:
Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:26:36]:
Yes. I think at a cellular level that’s exactly what’s happening. We’re in that cell danger. Our cells are in the cell danger response. The cells do not feel safe. The vagus nerve and the Autonomic nervous system don’t feel safe. And so the goal of healing is to get not only the cells on board, but the nervous system and the immune system system and everybody on board that the world is safe and we can heal now. Okay, any negatives to using this, these devices? And so this person is concerned about negative consequences for utilizing these long term?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:27:14]:
Yes. So anytime that you stimulate the vagus nerve, sometimes you can feel worse before you can feel better. That’s why we recommend that you go, you know, use them if you’re, if you know, you’re sensitive, like to start at a lower time that you’re using it. So like with some of the devices, maybe start with 30 seconds or a minute, like Dr. McCann said with Apollo Neuro, maybe don’t use it for 15 minutes, just use it for a few minutes. Because, yeah, sometimes it can activate the. If you are in a dorsal vagal shutdown and you go and you activate the vagus nerve, you can actually shift to the sympathetic, that ladder. That’s next step in the ladder. And so you actually might feel worse a little bit. So that just means to kind of back off a little bit and then try again and kind of find the right amount and the right device that works for you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:08]:
And, you know, I don’t think that these devices are necessarily intended to be a forever thing. They’re a tool. But things like community, laughter, stretching, movement, breathing, those are all intended to be lifelong. Right, right. That’s. That’s where we want to be, is living in ventral vagal. The vast majority of time having the tools that we need to, to remind us to stay in ventral vagal. But they’re tools. Do we have to take supplements indefinitely probably because the world is so toxic? Yes. But recognizing that these are tools in our toolkit and use them for as long as that you need to, and hopefully it will not be indefinite. And I think we’re almost out of time. Let’s see, we’ve asked, people have asked to share the slides. Okay, how about this one? When you are doing the breathing exercises, do you inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth or in and out through the nose? Does it matter?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:29:27]:
I don’t think it matters. I think it’s. What. Yeah. For you, but feels comfortable for you because you could do both. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:29:36]:
Is anyone using the sensate? What, what, what are your thoughts on it or how does it work?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:29:47]:
I’m actually not familiar with the sensate.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:29:50]:
Yeah, it’s on our list. I haven’t used it I know some patients have. So let’s see. Somebody asked, if you can’t manage cold showers, would you recommend splashing cold water on your face?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:30:08]:
Yeah, that’s a good. That’s a good thing to try some. I’ve seen people have like a bowl of ice and then they just put their face in it for. You can start with 10 seconds, 5 seconds, you know, whatever you can do.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:30:20]:
Yeah, I mean, you could do your. You could do a foot bath, an ice foot bath and try it that way, too. So anything that’s going to shift a little bit in terms of your experience. Gosh, what should we end with? What’s the difference between internal family systems psychotherapy and family constellation therapy? You can speak to internal family systems.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:30:50]:
Sense, for me were that you identify different parts in your psyche. There’s protector parts that are trying to protect you, and then there’s. There’s parts of you that need love and healing. And so you try to. My experience, it’s been a couple years, but I was kind of guided into it where, you know, you bring up a situation and then there are these voices that, that, you know, are speaking internally. And so you try to separate them from you and you try to look at them and, you know, give them a voice, essentially. Because a lot of these parts we’ve suppressed. Right. Whenever you repress anything, there’s like an angry part and an anxious part, and sometimes we just want to talk to you. So in that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:31:39]:
In.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:31:40]:
In therapy, what she did was to give the part parts of voice and then check back in to see how you were relating with that part. Like, if you were critical of that part, like, oh, that sounds annoying, then that’s like another. That’s like your critical part. Right. So you kind of separate that again until you kind of have all your parts out. And this is. To me, it was guided. And then you’re kind of left with like the higher self, right? The one that is fully accepting, compassionate and loving and that can observe all parts and be accepting of them and send them love. Right. Not trying to control the parts, just be very accepting and loving to the parts. I found that it was transformative in the sense that I was always very critical of myself. So it was a great way to have compassion for myself and the different parts that they. Each part had their own causes and conditions to. To be what that part is. So that was my. My experience. It kind of like led me back to like my. My higher self or true self and understood, like, if I. If it was powerful in the way like, if I could offer that compassion to myself, it was easier for me to have that compassion for other people, too.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:32:58]:
Absolutely.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:33:00]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [01:33:00]:
So the family in internal family systems refers to all of the parts inside of ourselves are our internal family. The angry part, the fearful part, the upset part, the jealous part, the. The yes. Whereas family constellation therapy has more to do with your external family, your parents, your grandparents or siblings, and the relationships that you have with those external family members. Well, thank you so much, Lauren, for your presentation, for your wisdom, for your beautiful, kind, gentle, loving nature. It’s so wonderful to spend time with you. And I know that our listeners have really enjoyed hearing your expertise and learning about what you had to share. This was a wonderful session. And as we’ve said, we will send out the replay for people next week, probably sometime early next week. Michelle will get that out. We’ll make sure to include the transcript as well as the video and we’ll include your slides as well because I think sometimes your head was in the way. People’s ability to read the slides. And we’ll also share the handout. So Lauren is offered to make a handout to list all of the vagus nerve devices. And you know, even if we didn’t cover a device that you have interest in, obviously we can’t cover them all. There are so many different devices and programs out there. We always love to hear from you. If you have favorite ones that you want to share with us, we’re happy to learn more. And, and yeah, I think my guidance would be. As you look at these different devices, pay attention to how attracted you are to certain programs or devices. If you love music, you might really want to try one that incorporates music. If you really want to work on your meditation, you might want to think about a meditative app or the museum. If you’re feeling like my life is too busy and I’m too overwhelmed and I can’t even think about, you know, playing around with a device. Well, the Apollo Neuro might be a great choice and a good place to start. So I hope that that’s helpful for everyone. Any last words that you’d like to share with our audience today?

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:35:37]:
Lauren, just thank you so much for your time and attention. And Dr. Kelly. Thank you, Dr. Me. Thank you so much for being such a wonderful mentor and I. I really enjoyed this conversation with you. I think it’s a very important topic and I hope that people have found benefit from it. Yeah. And we’re here for you all at the Spring Center. Yeah. So thank you so much. This was it was a fear conquered for me. It’s my first webinar. And so I apologize and thank you in advance for your patience. If maybe. Yeah, there were times when I was actually a little dysregulated. But I’m, I’m proud that I, you know, have done this. And thank you, Doctor, for this opportunity. It’s, it’s very special. And thank you, everyone again for being part of this as well. I wish you all the best on your healing journey.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:28]:
You’re welcome, Lauren, you’re wonderful. Okay, as for our next time, it’s still a little up in the air. Our next guest will be Dr. Darren Ingalls, hopefully. And that may be in about three weeks. Worth thinking about. We had some scheduling snafus, so stay tuned for that. And again, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. And we’ll see you next time.

Lauren Layson, PA-C [01:36:57]:
Bye.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host renowned cardiologist Dr. Jack Wolfson on our most recent webinar. Dr. Wolfson and I delved into the hidden dangers of environmental toxins and their profound impact on cardiovascular health. We discussed how air pollution, heavy metals, mold, plastics, and other everyday exposures can silently drive inflammation, high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and heart disease. Dr. Wolfson provided functional medicine strategies to help you identify, reduce, and detoxify these harmful substances while strengthening your heart naturally. We also broken down key lab tests, nutrient deficiencies, and evidence-based supplements that support heart health and longevity.

Whether you’re looking to prevent heart disease or optimize your well-being, this webinar is packed with actionable insights you won’t want to miss.

Click here to learn more from Dr. Jack Wolfson, or follow him @natural_heart_doctor on Instagram here.

Recommended products from the conversation with Dr. Wolfson:

• Cardio BP
• Omega Supreme
• Resvoxitrol 
• Endocalyx Pro
• Nattokinase

As always, for those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone and welcome. So happy that you could join Dr. Jack and I today for his webinar. Dr. Jack Wolfson is a cardiologist and founder of Natural Heart Dr. A worldwide leader in cardiovascular health. After 10 years of being in the largest heart care group in Arizona, he started his own company to offer people from around the world the ultimate in cardiac longevity. Today we’re going to chat about the things that impact our health, particularly our heart health and what you’ve been up to lately. So before we started, Dr. Jack was sharing a story that I think is really important for all of our listeners to hear about. Before we do that, I just want to welcome everyone. My assistant Michelle is in the chat and please give a shout out. Let us know where you’re signing in from. We always love to hear from people all around the world and it’s so cool to see where you’re from, tell us where you are, why you’re here, and then if you have any questions, please drop them in the Q and A and Dr. Jack will get to them. Towards the end, we usually do like an hour just sort of chatting back and forth, dropping lots of pearls of wisdom and then we’ll answer more specific questions towards the end. We usually go about an hour and a half. If you can hang out with us for that long. For those, those of you who have to drop off sooner than that, the replay will be available next week along with the whole transcript. And here we go. Take it away. Tell us about yourself, Dr. Jack, and what you’ve been up to.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:01:50]:
Well, first of all, let me say thank you so much for having me on. I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time and it’s nice over the last several months that you and I have been able to connect and I just, I so appreciate, you know, other, you know, medical doctors who step outside, you know, the box and outside of mainstream to really get to root cause medicine. And again, you’ve been such a leader, you know, in this for many years. My story really, I’m a board certified cardiologist. Like my father before me, I always like to say I was born into the medical matrix. So my father is talking about cardiology stuff and I’m in my mother’s womb. I’m listening to these things. So right from the get go, I wanted to be a cardiologist and I would do exactly that. And unfortunately, as my career was really taking off with the biggest group in the state of Arizona, as you said, my father was not doing that well. Actually he was suffering from a Parkinson’s like illness that eventually would be diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic as progressive supranuclear palsy, or psp. And they said, there’s no treatment for it and we have no idea why he got sick and he’ll be dead within three years on average. And simultaneously and serendipitously, I met, I was introduced to this woman. God introduced me to this woman through a mutual friend. And he, you know, and I started talking to this woman, and she’s a 29 year old chiropractor at the time, and she tells me all the reasons why my father is sick and dying in these early conversations. So the Mayo Clinic has no clue. And here’s the 29 year old Dr. Of chiropractic who has a clue. So I listened to what she had to say. I started to change the way I practiced. The short story is I would eventually leave that big cardiology group and then start my own company where, yeah, we’re trying to get to root cause cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, coronary disease, heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, atrial fibrillation. A lot of women with PACs, PVCs, palpitations, and that’s really our focus at Natural Heart.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:03:43]:
Doctor, thank goodness you’re doing this work. Yeah, it’s super, super important, as you know from your own personal experience. So I know we were going to talk about environmental toxins, but I did want to ask you about what’s going on with you now because mold has been a big driver for cardiovascular health, although there’s not many people who talk about it. So please share, if you’re willing, a little bit about what’s going on.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:04:20]:
Yeah, no, I’d love to.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:04:21]:
I’d love to.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:04:21]:
I think our personal journeys, obviously oftentimes make us what we are. And, you know, really, I didn’t have a personal backstory to how I felt. I felt perfectly fine. You know, my motivation was seeing my father get sick and die. And of course, as I would, you know, get married and, you know, to this young chiropractor and now have four children, I didn’t want to die at 63. So it became really interesting, you know, and imperative for me to pay attention to this. So Fast forward to 2018. We are living in a home and my wife is not feeling well. She’s struggling with our third child. The child is having trouble nursing, breastfeeding, latching, gaining weight. My wife has to start going out and get donor milk, which when you are looking for especially high quality donor milk, you know, it’s Very difficult. And in that sense of, you know, and my wife, you know, literally, she’s sitting at the, at the kitchen table one day and she’s sucking down a glutathione nebulizer while she’s trying to pump at the same time and trying to nurse the baby on the other side. And she looks under, at the kitchen, under the kitchen sink, and there’s a stream of water coming out. And she, like dropped everything, looked under the sink, and, you know, and then eventually it was discovered that there was something that was under the floor and that was. And that was mold. And it was something that we had talked about on a cursory level, but never really dove, you know, deep and never really suspected that it was us. And that was the, you know, root cause of our, of our thing. So, you know, anyway, so we immediately evacuated that house. And it really led to us becoming, you know, and certainly me, I would say, you know, the most knowledgeable person in the world about the heart health ramifications of living in mold and bacteria, for that matter, from water damage. And it’s not like I’m some super brilliant guy. It’s just a matter of, as, you know, there’s not many people who study this kind of stuff in the medical industry. And, and, you know, it’s interesting. I’ve been on, I’ve been medical expert witness on two legal cases, and then the cardiologist in the opposition you know, says, oh, there’s no evidence that mold leads to cardiovascular diseases. That I come in with this whole stack of literature like, oh, why don’t you take a look at this? And then immediately they settle because the cardiologist looks at that and they’re like, wow, I have no clue how mold led to this person developing either a heart attack or a stroke or in one of those cases, atrial fibrillation. So, yeah, it was kind of like trial by fire. And then to update everybody on us personally, we were. So we evacuated that house and then we moved. We decided to move from Arizona to Colorado. And the Colorado house did not have mold. After a couple of years, it actually had high bacteria counts. We tried to mitigate. We were not successful in doing so. My wife was not feeling well, so of course, hey, I’m out. We sold the house. We moved into another beautiful rental home. And that house was fine until the owner of the house said that he had to do some repair work on the roof. And it’s a brand new house, beautiful house in Colorado, Mountain house, the whole thing. And the instrumenting of the roof led to some. Apparently there were some issues with the roof that needed to be repaired. And this was the problem. So we decided to leave that house and we had nowhere to go. Dr. Kelly. We had nowhere to go. So this is where the story starts to get interesting, right? We take off from Colorado and we decide we’re going to go stay at a state park in California because it’s wintertime, right? So this is towards the end of December and we decide we’re going to stay at a state park in California where the weather is doable outside. You can’t do it in California, Colorado, obviously, or my hometown of Chicago. So we get my. My two boys and I, our two boys and I, we get out there first, we set up camp and then that night, 3:00 in the morning, the first night we’re there, beautiful campsite, the whole thing that we get awakened by the state park ranger saying there is a fire close by. And this turned out to be the Malibu Creek fire. Like our first night there. We get evacuated from the site and then so my wife and actually our two daughters and a friend, they now drove in and we wound up tent camping north of Santa Barbara. And we were there for four nights. And then we started looking at homes, thinking, okay, let’s just try things out in California because we wanted brand new homes. And some of those areas, as I mentioned before, Pacific Palisades, those houses are now gone. So now we wind up in Corona del Mar down by you, and we are staying in a house and that house goes sideways. So as I speak to you now, everyone, we are tent camping. My wife and I are four children, ages 17 down to 4, two cats, a dog, and kind of like an assistant, I would say, in three tents on a front friend’s property in Arizona. And I got to tell you, it’s pretty liberating. It’s pretty cheap, you know, I mean, like, we don’t have any expenses as far as, you know, rent or anything like that. We’re staying at our friend’s house and they’re very gracious and, you know, I’ll buy some groceries and, you know, whatever other side stuff for them. But it’s, it’s been an experience that I believe is our destiny. So I can share this certainly with the world. Like, hey, it sounds crazy, but can you. If you’re sick in your home, how sick are you? How important is your health to you and can you do something like this?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:20]:
Right?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:10:21]:
Wow.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:22]:
Yeah, I definitely have had some patients over the years live in tents in their backyard, if they could, or in their, you know, family’s yards. And it definitely has helped many people be able to make that transition. Yeah, I probably should have warned you about Corona del Mar. No matter. Most of those homes are older, even if they’re new build. I don’t know, I don’t know about California. It really seems like the builders don’t know how to build here, that they throw things up overnight and they’re not. There’s no attention to detail. So unless you’re in, you know, in close communication with the builder, I’m not sure how, how safe it is in many of these situations, which makes it really unattainable for, for people. Now that being said, you know, I, I always want to provide hope to listeners and say, you know, some people are more sensitive than others. Some people can figure out a way to live in a less moldy house. And I, myself and my husband just moved from a more moldy house, which was less moldy than our previous moldy house. And now we’re in a even less moldy house that’s a relatively new build and I feel fairly confident about it. And then of course, my husband went and got some sort of terrible virus. And so now we can’t tell.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:11:51]:
Well, that’s the thing, Dr. Kelly, right. It’s like, is there some terrible virus or like, why are we getting symptomatic? So even in this California house in Corona del Mar. Yeah, it was brand new, but kind of like as we were signing the lease and we really didn’t have anywhere.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:12:06]:
To go and we just weren’t prepped.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:12:08]:
For long term tent camping at that point because we had been actually tent camping for about two weeks prior to moving into this. We had found out that that house was about three years under construction for a whole variety of reasons in California. So now you can see how that house turned very quickly. But we all kind of had this mysterious like viral flu like symptoms. And most people like, oh yeah, well, if they go to their doctor, right? Oh, it’s a viru. Oh, we’ll take Tylenol or ibuprofen. And I also want to say too, like, I feel for a lot of the women, you know, most certainly because the women of the Canary in the coal mine, four out of five times they’re the one with overt symptoms. They complain to their husband. The husband’s like, oh, this is total bs. I’m not selling this. We’re not doing this. All the expense of this. And meanwhile, and because the husband says he feels Fine. Meanwhile, he’s on the verge of having a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. He’s got erectile dysfunction. He’s got no libido. He’s going running around looking for testosterone shots, you know, but he’s, he’s fine. You’re the crazy woman because you’re brain fogged and your skin’s itching off your body and you got all these GI complaints, you know, and you’re irritable and you’re cranky and your hormones are all over, you know, and so. So I do feel for people in that situation. And I’m very, you know, again, empathetic. I’ve been through it and it. I don’t know if to tell you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:13:28]:
Right.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:13:28]:
It tests your relationship. It really, really, really does. But, yeah, I mean, and thank God, you know, again, for you because, you know, these women are not, they’re not alone, you know, in this. And they need, you know, medical leaders who understand this and say, hey, you know, we’re all together on this, and groups and tribes, you know, like this, where, hey, we’re all in this together.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:13:50]:
Yes. And so let’s circle back. Let’s use this as a great segue because I do think that many of the people who suffer from toxin related cardiovascular damage feel fine. Right. And so this is the big dilemma. And how do you speak to somebody’s health in a preventative way when the toxins that are poisoning are not affecting them?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:14:21]:
Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, this is, you know, what you do as well, right? You just do the most advanced testing in the world to be able to show people, you know, kind of like, you know, you are a ticking time bomb. I don’t know what else to really say about it except for, to tell you the truth in the best way possible. Right. So you are a ticking time bomb. You look at markers of inflammation, oxidative stress. You know, as you. I love when, like, white counts are a little bit low and like, oh, well, that’s perfectly fine. There’s a little bit on the low side, like, no, you’re living in mold, poison, or some other poisons. I mean, you and I both know there’s many. There’s hundreds of thousands of different chemicals, you know, that are out there. But I think mold and bacteria are interesting because they’re living, breathing organisms that want to survive. You know, whenever someone’s, you know, the husband’s like, what’s a mold? Mycotoxin. Where’d you come up with that focus? And I had a cardiologist say, this mold, mycotoxin.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:15:10]:
I’ve never heard of that.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:15:10]:
I said, have you ever heard of penicillin? You know, have you ever heard of penicillin? And they’re like, oh, have you ever heard of red yeast rice and citrine in. Which is a mold, Mycotoxin. You ever heard of mycophenolic acid, which is a pharmaceutical called cellcept, you know, or cyclosporine? These are mold toxins, and they’re like, oh, wow. Yeah, I guess so, you know, and anyways, so I think, you know, to your point, it’s kind of like, yeah, you identify to the men, these are the symptoms that are potentially from mold, likely from mold, almost assuredly from mold. And then you’re also like, hey, you know, if you want, you know, you got this family history, you know, for example, do you want to do a deeper dive? Then you look at the discovery in the labs, and you’re like, man, you’re. You have high levels of oxidative stress and inflammation, and that is linked to you being dead or having a stroke or heart attack, you know, and. And hopefully that gets people’s attention. But, yeah, as you know, it’s like the more pain you’re in, the more willing you are to make these changes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:16:15]:
Right. Can you run through a list of some of the common tests that you run? I mean, you mentioned a couple, but can you be more specific for our listeners? Because I think that’s really helpful, especially if they’re in different places where, like, the woman from Belgium, thank you so much for being here. That’s awesome. We’ll do our best to try and help, you know, guide. Guide you. But can you run. Run down a list?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:16:44]:
Yeah. And then if you do live in Belgium, you know, some of the housing structures, as you know, that people live in there, they’re hundreds of years old. Like, they definitely have mold. And then where do you go next?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:16:55]:
You know, I didn’t make the rules.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:16:57]:
You, Dr. Kelly, you didn’t make the rules. It’s just like, this is our reality. And it goes back to the Bible, you know, where Moses is talking about this in the book of Leviticus, if you’re living in mold, you got to mitigate it. It’s got to be inspected by a rabbi. And if it’s not remediated, then you have to burn the whole thing down, you know, and. Which takes us back even to those Palisade fires. And you got, like, all this stuff that’s now aerosolized. You aerosolized all this poison up into the air and then the downstream ram. The test that I like, I think if we had to look at one test, I think the markers of oxidative stress, where it’s a, you know, whether it’s a urinary lipid, peroxides, oxidized ldl, which I love for cardiac people, myeloperoxidase, which is available in every testing company, as you know, in the entire world. I mean you can get that in like a third world country. You know, those markers of oxidative stress, HSCRP markers of inflammation, those are some of the basics that every single lab will do. But even for someone who’s like, oh my cholesterol is abnormal. Well, why is your cholesterol abnormal? Why is your body not clearing out old LDL particles leading to abnormal lipids while your liver is dysfunctional? Because it’s toxic. Right. So, you know, I love this too. We know where the whole idea like whatever your health problems are some two things, too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good stuff. Right. So you reverse that, you get more good stuff, less bad stuff. And that’s the, and that’s the thing there. There’s other cardiac markers. I like homocysteine. Of course, when that’s elevated, that’s clearly a problem. One I’m not a big genetics guy for sure. I believe our genetics are built perfect. By God, it’s only a man made poisonous lifestyle and I’m blaming the men on this one that, you know, that’s all the different toxins and stuff like that. Our genetics are perfect. But there is one gene called LP or LP parentheses little A that is it leads to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. I think there was benefit to it. I mean there’s, you know, why would 20% of the population have that? You know, historically there must have been a benefit to that gene. I think it actually was a survival type of protein that actually led to hypercoagulability in the face of trauma. So I think that was beneficial for some of those people, you know, back in the day. And again, like even like mthfr, like back in the day, there must have been some reason and maybe it did lead to you being. Now it’s all anxiety and, you know, emotional issues. But if you had a little OCD back in, you know, caveman days, it probably was beneficial. Like if you’re looking over your shoulder all the time thinking someone’s going to kill you, well, that’d be a good, good treat to have back then.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:19:34]:
Absolutely.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:19:35]:
But I, you know, I love all.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:19:36]:
The toxin testing as you do, whether it’s environmental toxins, you know, the plastics, the phthalates, parabens, the VOCs, the pesticides. I love looking at the, you know, of course, the mold and bacteria, you know, Swiffer tests. I love mold, mycotoxin testing. I’m not a huge metals guy anymore. I just, you know, I’m not overly. Yeah, I mean I’m not into injecting mercury out to say the least, you know, and some of these other, you know, poisons. But I think, I think the metals have been around on this, you know, on earth for a long time and our body is built to deal with that. Unless obviously it’s in crazy high amounts or it’s in your teeth or injected into you. And then I love intracellular nutrient testing. Right. So you know, K2 keeps calcium in the bones and out of the arteries. So you know, what is your intracellular levels of vitamin K2, for example? Anyways, yeah, those are just some of the things that I like. I love the leaky gut testing as do as well. And then again, you know, root cause. Why does someone have leaky gut? Well, you know, you destroy the gut microbiome from all these toxins, you get leaky gut. So.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:20:38]:
Yep. And mold and mycotoxins and all the fungal overgrowth absolutely leads to SIFO and then leaky gut and you know, who knows what else. So what about coronary calcium scores versus like CT angiogram? What’s your thought on that? Looking for patients?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:21:00]:
Yeah, I’m an anti radiation guy, so.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:21:04]:
Even, you know, there are a handful.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:21:05]:
Of us holistic and integrative cardiologists, but I, and they recommend, you know, ct, you know, coronary calcium scans. I don’t just, you know, I don’t like the radiation obviously, even though they say it’s a small amount of radiation and you get more radiation when you travel from LA to Tokyo. Well, I guess if we were going to Tokyo, there’d be reason for it. You know, we’re going to visit, you know, Japan and we got a conference there. Like there’s, there’s a reason why we.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:21:29]:
Would be going there.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:21:30]:
There’s no reason to do a CT scan if you were to say, because any test that we do, right. If you’re going to do a test, how does it change the results? Right. You run some kind of gut panel on somebody, it’s because the results will change what our plan is. If you get a CT scan, how is that going to change Your plan? Okay, you got a calcium score that’s high. What are you going to do? Well, now I’m going to eat better or am I going to take a statin drug? I’ve not recommended, I’ve not prescribed a statin drug or recommended a statin drug in over 10 years. So again, I don’t find that test useful if you’re not motivated by the way you feel, if you’re not motivated by the way you look, if you’re not motivated by the fact that heart attacks and strokes are the number one killer of people worldwide, if you’re not motivated by the blood work, if you’re not motivated by the fact that everybody in your family dropped dead, a heart disease, is the CT scan going to be the motivating factor? That’s the final thing. So, yeah, in short, I’m not a fan of that test. There’s no need to have routine stress testing. That’s, you know, if you have symptoms, you get a stress test. Cardiac ultrasound is okay, you know, because that’s not radiation based, it’s non ionizing radiation. Carotid ultrasound, carotid intima media thickness can be a couple tests that you could use if you want to do more advanced, not even advanced, but different testing from, you know, blood, urine, stool, saliva, like the typical stuff that, that, that we would do.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:22:56]:
So since I have a brick and mortar, I, I actually do order coronary calcium scores, and I do find them helpful, particularly for patients if I want to. You know, I agree with you. We want to do a test that’s going to change what our treatment plan is. And so for patients who do have an elevated coronary calcium score, I tend to recommend that they do IV phosphatidylcholine as part of their treatment regimen to try and really move out that calcification and stabilize it as much as possible. So I do.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:23:30]:
Yes. Yeah, I’m with you on that. I’m with you on that. And again, that’s really the thing is that a lot of time, what happens in mainstream medicine, of course, is that they go for the CT scan and it’s not covered by insurance, it never has been. And they’ll offer it as like, right, it’s a loss leader. So now you get the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. Now you have a billable diagnosis. Now they can do a stress nuclear test, make a ton of money. God forbid that leads to an angiogram and a stent. And this is all in the person without symptoms. It’s all in the person without symptoms. So it’s like when you go down that track, I think it’s definitively, you know, a problem. But if you’re going to say, okay, listen, listen, we’ve got this therapy, phosphatidyl, you know, IV phosphatidylcholine. And it’s, you know, listen, it does, you know, it’s an investment in time and money. And if you do have evidence of coronary calcification, we’re gonna do it. And frankly, if you don’t have that, then we may not find it necessary. Now of course you may do it for other reasons. If they’re mold sick and you’re looking to clear out those membranes, you know, then you may do it anyways. But and I think also, you know, that, you know, that strict attention to. Yeah, it is said to be a small amount of radiat. But how do we support somebody through that process? You know, is there different, you know, things we can do before, immediately after and in that timeframe after the radiation based test? And I, you know, I have a protocol on my website that we, that we recommend. You’ve got stuff, you know, as well that you do. And clearly the person who is eating well, living well, thinking well will have the least amount of radiation damage. It is interesting and I’ll throw one more thing out there. There is some ev. That low dose ionizing radiation.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:25:23]:
Right.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:25:23]:
Is really hormetic. Is that it actually is beneficial because it’s a stressor on the system and that there could be some medicinal value to the CAC test. I’m not there yet. It’s just kind of my company line. But it really is about, you know, how is it going to change the plan. And for some people, you know, Kelly, as you know, it may be motivational like okay, now that you told me I’m in the top 10% of people.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:25:53]:
With coronary artery disease, like now I’m.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:25:55]:
Going to do something about it. Okay, that’s fine.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:58]:
Well, and right. Because we are talking about in large part men. Not always, but if they feel fine, they might not be that motivated. So I think that’s where that conversation the art of medicine. Now honestly, you know, I have got a family history of cardiovascular disease on both sides. I probably should get one of those because yeah, I’m motivated, I eat healthy, blah, blah, blah. My blood sugars are a little higher than they should be, you know.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:26:31]:
Well, I, I mean, but again, like, you know, it’s so, I mean, if.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:26:36]:
You have, you know, family history, I mean, why don’t we just assume everybody’s got coronary artery disease because pretty much everybody does. Like at some, by some point, you know, it’s already, it’s already there. And I think because there is so much benefit to oral phosphatidylcholine, IV phosphatidylcholine.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:26:58]:
I think it could be said, like.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:27:00]:
If you’re looking for this next level biohack, on top of the food we eat, the lifestyle that we lead, the thoughts that we think, or you could even be said, hey, listen, you know, you’ve got all these toxins. We’re going to use detox remedies, including IV phos. You’ve got evidence of inflammation, oxidative stress. We’re going to use IV phos. And I think, you know, it, it is a good strategy, you know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:27:25]:
Yes. So, and we kind of talked about the common pollutants that are associated with heart health. So let’s talk about where they are. Where are all these toxins? I mean, we talked about mold, but maybe you can run down a list of where some of the other things that people might not think about.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:27:44]:
Well, let me give you another one, which is plastic, you know, which, you know, and obviously bisphenol A is a hormone disruptor and all different types of things like, and it’s all over the medical literature, right? This is not just, you know, just, you know, us crazy people just shouting out, you know, you know about it. I mean, it really is true. And there was a study that came.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:28:01]:
Out a year ago in the New.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:28:03]:
England Journal of Medicine that looked at people who were undergoing a carotid endarterectomy. So it was a procedure to clean out the carotid arteries that supply the brain. And what they did was they looked at the carotid artery plaque.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:28:17]:
After they scooped it out, if you.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:28:18]:
Will, they looked under a microscope and they divided the groups into two. One group had evidence of microplastic, so they look under a microscope and they found the plastic. And then the other group, surprisingly, one third of the people, they didn’t see any plastic in the group with the plastic had tripled the risk of heart attack, stroke and dying in a three year period. Which makes plastic in an artery a bigger risk factor than smoking, than obesity, than diabetes, than high blood pressure combined times three, you know, so when you look at that and you’re like, okay, now I want to get plastic out of my life, which is not easy, right? We just talked about if you’re, if you’re downstream from the fires, that stuff is all aerosolized. So you do your best in a toxic world. You know, you don’t drink out of cheap plastic bottles. You, you know, drink clean quality water. I think another big offender there, Dr. Kelly, is the clothing. You know, I mean, you know, you know, polyester clothing, acrylic clothing. Even these days, you know, up in Colorado, like I’m, you know, I love.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:29:31]:
Wearing, you know, like, you know, winter.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:29:33]:
Hats, you know, winter, you know, beanies and stuff like that. And you’re trying to find a cashmere one, a cotton one. They’re all acrylic, they’re all, I mean these are all plastic. And all these plastic fibers, we breathe them in, they enter in through our bodies. You know, you go to the grocery store and you get salsa, like pre made salsa in a plastic container. Like it’s just digesting the plastic. So it’s not, I mean, geez, I mean, you can get again like other places for plastic in the house. Plastic and mattresses, you know, synthetic mattresses, you know, that you’re breathing in. It’s definitively a problem. And you do your best to do. And I think also all the different protocols that we have as far as getting rid of plastic, you know, go to gut microbiome, helps you digest the microplastics, break them down so you, you know, again, you poop them out, don’t absorb them. There’s you know, specific companies that are looking at probiotics that specifically help to digest microplastics and bisphenol A. But ultimately, right, test your urinary levels for bisphenol A and if they’re high, you better do something about it. I mean, it’s nice they’re coming out of your body, but it also does imply obviously that you’re getting high level of exposure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:46]:
Right. And you know, I think unlike something like chelation for heavy metals, which we know works very definitively, you can look before and after. I think some of the protocols that we have to enhance the excretion of the microplastics or God forbid even look at the nanoplastics, they are marginal at best. So it’s really, it’s really dependent upon us as consumers, as humans on the planet that we have to do our utmost best to try and limit the plastic. And yeah, it’s super hard. I mean, just, just thinking about having to redo my entire wardrobe, try and get rid of plastic. That’s not going to happen. I will, I will say a couple of tidbits for people who are starting to feel overwhelmed. Plastic when it degrades, it ends up in the dust. So one of the best things you can do is vacuum, vacuum, vacuum, keeping the dust minimalized in your home. And then air filters for all the aerosolized dust particles and plastics and other toxicants like your pesticides, when you walk on the grass that’s been sprayed with pesticide and you walk in your house not wearing your shoes in the house, and then working hard to avoid plastic with your food, with your drinking water. So going to farmers markets and bringing your own bags that are not plastic, those sorts of things. When we wash our, you know, polyester clothes, that’s when a lot of the, the plastics get into the water and that gets into the oceans and the streams and the rivers. And that’s why there’s so much plastic. That’s another reason why there’s so much plastic everywhere. So there are companies out there that are really trying to have good quality organic cotton clothing. You just have to spend a little more when you do that.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:32:56]:
I mean, this T shirt I’m wearing right now, this is from a company called wearpacked. So this is organic cotton clothing. And then also to your point, and again, the air purifiers and stuff and the dust, obviously I agree on that. But I am sitting outside of a Starbucks. I’m not drinking anything from Starbucks because I only drink organic coffee and plenty of it in the morning. I love coffee. That is definitely my vice of choice and it is heart healthy. And that’s when you drink garbage coffee. If you drink the good stuff, I believe even better. If you’re sensitive to caffeine, obviously I’m not encouraging you to do it, but I’m sitting outside of a Starbucks. What is inside of that cup? That’s not paper cup. It’s not a paper cup. It’s all plastic. It’s all plastic on the inside. Those metal, those metal disposable water bottles, a lot of times they’re not selling, they’re selling glass, of course, which is our preferred way. They’re selling plastic water bottles, which we’ll avoid whenever possible. And then they’re selling those metal throwaway bottles, but those are all lined with plastic. And I think, you know, Kelly, that you know, plastic containers, you know, it’s. Well, what about your supplement bottle? Your supplement bottle is made out of plastic.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:34:08]:
It’s.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:34:08]:
Listen, it’s not perfect, but those are thick plastics that are not going to get onto your capsules. It really is like that liquid, especially acidic liquid in the face of heat that’s going to Be like the big offender. So, yeah, I mean, I think like.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:34:26]:
I said, we have to, we have to be reasonable and make the smart choices that we can. I, you know, when you go to the grocery store and all the meats are covered in plastic, I think, oh, gosh, yeah, I gotta, I need to get a regenerative farmer and just buy stuff from that person.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:34:45]:
And you rinse that off, right? I mean, you know, you rinse that off. I mean, listen, yeah, it’s, it’s very easy to get, you know, down in the world and just say, you know what? I’m just gonna, you know, drink my boxed wine from a plastic bag and like, whatever happens, happens. But, you know, it is, it is a journey. It does take time. And you know, you write down the list of all the bad stuff and then you, you start to get, you know, very, very adept at doing your best. And it is the best. And I think it, again, it’s very empowering, you know, and at the end of the day you can try your best and, and then you pray for, you know, for a good outcome.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:35:21]:
Absolutely. So let’s talk more kind of anatomically and physiologically about how these toxins disrupt the heart function. What is it that they’re doing to the heart?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:35:36]:
Well, I think the primary way is going to be through damaging the gut microbiome, that all these pesticides would be obvious that if something is killing pests and plants, then it’s going to also damage the bacteria and the other co. Inhabitants of your gut. The, the mycotoxins, as we said, if penicillium produces a mold mycotoxin that we now call penicillin or mycophenolic acid or these dozens of other things that are known to be antibiotics, for example, that clearly is going to damage your gut microbiome. The other things, whether it’s obviously, you know, glyphosate, as we mentioned, other things that could damage the gut microbiome. Now you have the damaged gut microbiome that will lead to intestinal hyperpermeability, otherwise known as leaky gut. Inflammation, oxidative stress, immune system activation, autonomic dysfunction. And then you have, so you have this leaky gut and then you also have leaky heart. You have leaky endothelium where the endothelium, the delicate lining of the blood vessels leaks. And as, as those, you know, tight junctions, as the intracellular junctions, the cells, you know themselves become hyperpermeable. Now you have this extravasation of different blood components that get into the lining of the blood vessels, the interior parts, the intima, the media in particular. And again, that sets up more inflammation, Immune cell activation called macrophages, they turn into foam cell monocytes that turn macrophages to foam cells cells. And then now the foam cells die. That’s your plaque. The plaque ruptures and then you’re dead. So that is, that is just one scenario of, you know, what I think is the big thing. And the medical doctors know that inflammation, oxidative stress is bad. They just treat it with pharmaceuticals. You know, they just don’t know about root cause. And that’s where you and I, you know, come in to specialize in, in that root cause medicine. Now also. So as it relates to, you know, we talked about, you know, cholesterol. So someone solely have high cholesterol. Why is your cholesterol high? Nobody’s making too much cholesterol. It’s really just a matter of they’re not clearing the cholesterol on the LDL particle. The LDL bus that’s made in the liver, it’s circulating around the body and the liver is not clearing it because the liver’s sick. The liver’s sick from all the environmental toxins, pollutants. It’s sick because we’re not giving it enough good stuff, right? Seafood and, and we’re not getting enough sunshine and sleep. And we’ve got too much stress. And you know, when we’re under stress, the liver is not regenerating, it’s not cleaning itself out. So you have these old LDL particles that circulate. There are some supplements, for example, like berberine, helps to upgrade LDL receptors. Of course. There’s a injectable pharmaceutical called Repatha is the brand name for that very expensive, ineffective drug as far as outcomes are concerned that, you know, clears old LDL particles. But you can do that with a bunch of different natural supplements that, that do it. Atrial fibrillation, again, you got this inflammation and it leads to PACS, PVCs, irregular heartbeats, irritability of the heart. And then the biggest one of that would be atrial fibrillation, which is very common, high blood pressure. Right. So we talked about how when you have that leaky gut, now you’ve got these leaky blood vessels, ineffective blood vessels, loss of nitric oxide, you become hypertensive. So, you know, really we can just kind of string this along, you know, to whether it’s cardiomyopathy, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. See a lot of that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:39:16]:
The, is driving a Lot of the pots and dysautonomias that you’re seeing.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:39:22]:
Well, I think, you know, definitely, as we’ve talked about ad nauseum, you know, is. Is mold is definitely a factor. I think, obviously, vaccines are a factor. You know, I’ve just seen too. Way too many cases of, you know, and maybe it is kind of like this underlying mold toxicity and the smoldering mold toxicity. Maybe throw in somebody’s genetics, and then now HPV shot. HPV shot, you know, was written up by the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic, you know, did a. Did a whole case series on the HPV shots. So that’s one thing that’s there. You know, certainly trauma. You know, is there a head trauma, emotional trauma? You know, we talked about, you know, too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good stuff. Well, you know, I mean, the bad stuff is childhood trauma, ptsd, ongoing adult trauma, bad relationships, bad jobs. You know, two things that are common for women that are medical diagnoses. One is spontaneous coronary artery dissection, one of the most common causes of myocardial infarction, heart attacks in premenopausal women. And then the other is broken heart syndrome. Right? That’s takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, where the woman, 50 years old, gets in an argument with her boss. A few hours later, she’s having chest pain. We go in there with a catheter, take some pictures. There’s no actual blockage. It was probably a spasm or acute thrombosis that led to a massive myocardial infarction. And a lot of these women die or they’re suffering, you know, from chronic congestive heart failure because of that. Of that damage. And these things are. They’re not that rare. They’re not that rare. So.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:40:52]:
So just to, like, elaborate a little bit more for our listeners who may not have a. A sophisticated understanding of the heart, can you break it down a little bit? Like we’re talking about blood vessel issues versus electrical issues, and then maybe explain what congestive heart failure is, because I think a lot of patients don’t really understand that.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:41:24]:
Yes, I apologize. You and I talk so fast and so fluidly because we live and breathe this for so many years. And I guess that’s what’s great about recording it. Like, you can slow it down or you can get the transcript and you can take notes, and that’s okay to slowly digest it, because we’re not here to stress people out, because stress is really bad, for sure, you know, but the heart Has a plumbing system, right? Those are the arteries. The heart has an electrical system. That’s what you measure on an ekg, right? So you see the electrical activity, which is another, you know, you. And I haven’t touched on EMF even yet. You know, electromagnetic magnetic fields. And even, you know, years ago, I’m walking around Whole Foods and I see this woman in there, and I approach her and I said, hey, listen, I’m.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:42:08]:
A happily married man.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:42:10]:
I’m sorry to intrude on your shopping at Whole Foods, but I want to tell you, I’m a cardiologist and you have your cell phone on top of your heart. She’s wearing, like, this exercise, like, you know, top. And you know how it is, right? It’s tucked in the strap right here. And I’m like, I just gotta tell you that that’s not good. It’s sitting on top of your heart. And, you know, the phone’s electrical, your heart’s electrical. And she’s like, oh, my gosh, I’ve been having heart racing feelings, and my heart skips and it flips and it thuds and I feel like I’m gonna pass out. I’m like, I’m not saying it’s everything, but that’s, that’s one factor, you know, that whole EMF story. But, you know, so again, you got the plumbing issues, you got the electrical issues. And then, you know, to answer, you know, and to answer your question about, you know, cardiomyopathy literally means heart muscle dysfunction. There’s a whole variety of things that can do that. And then the way that I would view congestive heart failure is when you’re currently symptomatic from cardiomyopathy. So somebody may have cardiomyopathy with the way that we measure that by the heart squeezing, we call that an ejection fraction. And that can be, you know, reduced. But some of those people are running marathons, and some of the people are in the hospital with acute congestive heart failure. There is a blood test called a bnp. B as in boy, N as in Nancy, you know, P as in peptide.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:43:47]:
That.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:43:48]:
That can be measured as well. That can tell you, you know, your status on that as well. But, yeah, hopeful clears up things a little bit for people. But I think, I think most of the, you know, most of the time we are. When I am speaking to women, it is going to be this. This palpitations, like, you know, the flip flops. And of course, what happens is you go to the traditional cardiologist and they’re.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:44:07]:
Like, yeah, you got some of these.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:44:09]:
Extra beats that are going on. It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it. You know, and, you know, and you know it’s not going to kill you.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:44:15]:
And then the woman’s sitting there, but.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:44:17]:
I feel like it’s going to kill me or I feel like I’m going to die. I’m very scared. I’m glad that you’re feeling okay with it, but I don’t like the way it’ feels. And then the beauty of what you and I do, right, is that we go after root cause. And, you know, I mean, it’s easy to say, yeah, try some magnesium, you know, try this supplement, whatever. But I mean, but oftentimes it is a lot more in depth of a conversation. Like magnesium doesn’t always work for that scenario. So, yeah, you know, better to get tested and see what’s going on.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:44:49]:
So what? Just because it’s so common. So after magnesium, what would you tend to tell people? Like, electrolytes, a little bit of potassium? I mean, I know we want to get to root cause, but also when people come, they want symptom relief, right. And they want root cause, but they, they really want to feel better. They want to be reassured. And I think the way that the conventional doctors go about it, because they don’t really understand what’s happening, and they don’t. They haven’t put themselves in that position. They’re like, oh, you’re fine. You’re not going to die of a heart attack. You don’t have a, a heartbeat that is going to kill you. So, you know, good luck with that. The, the patients end up feeling like, well, exactly as you describe. They feel gaslit and they feel misunderstood, and they still don’t have a solution to their problem. So what might be some things that you would offer for somebody who’s having a little bit of problem with palpitations or heartbeat issues?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:45:49]:
Issues, yeah. So I, I think magnesium is a fine first choice. Obviously, you’re talking about quality magnesiums, not mag oxide, nothing with mag oxide. But all, you know, quality magnesiums could be good magnesium, salt baths and stuff like that. I’m a huge seafood guy. I love seafood. I think seafood is the healthiest, most important food on the planet. You know, you know, if, if not for anything, except for the omega 3 fatty acids that are in there that you best get from eating the seafood. And that, of course, helps to stabilize those cell membranes. This goes back to our conversation about IV phosphatidylcholine eating Eggs, for example, are very high in choline. Animal products to me are always the answer. So those are things. Sometimes it’s a potassium story. So cranking up your levels of potassium from food, eating more avocados, for example, or you know, chocolate, which of course is always high. Magnesium, potassium, you know, fiber, vitamins, vitamin C and E that are in there, good antioxidants. The, or taking potassium powder supplements. As long as you have normal kidney function, you’re not on an ACE inhibitor, angiotensin receptor blocker, you know, pharmaceuticals for blood pressure, then you can easily take, you know, higher dose potassium. Those are, I think, you know, pretty good.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:47:02]:
I mean, you can go down the.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:47:03]:
Line of, you know, sometimes B vitamin deficiency that’s very commonly seen and then, you know, just trying to clear out those toxins. But, and listen, let me give a shout out to the chiropractic care, you know, so chiropractic care is really good. Help support the autonomic nervous system. The chiropractic adjustment positively influences the autonomic nervous system. Things that are spiritual in nature, you know, where you are engaging that parasympathetic nervous system, that can be very beneficial as well. Whether that’s alternate nostril breathing, prayer, gargle, sing, hum, those can, those can do it. If you’re having a bad episode too, what happens is, as you start to, when you get physically active now, your heart, your sinus nodes, the electrical pacemaker of the heart goes faster. So you can kind of break some of that symptomatology as opposed to when you’re sitting because oftentimes it’s, you’re laying in bed, you’re quiet, the heart rate’s slowing down, and now those extra beats jump in. I equate that to if you’re at the, you know, the carnival and you’re.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:48:04]:
You’Re, you’re looking at the merry go.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:48:06]:
Round, you know, where the kids get on and that’s spinning around. When it slows down, you can get on easily. When it’s going fast, you can’t get on. You know, you can’t get on the ride. When it’s, when your heart slows down, that’s when the extra beats can jump in. So someone just made the comment to talk more slowly. I’m so, I’m so sorry. I want to get this information out there and I apologize in advance, but like I said, we can, we can share the review, hopefully. Right, right.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:35]:
And yes, yes, people can kind of.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:48:37]:
Break it down a little bit.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:38]:
We are sharing the replay and there will be a transcript. And so when you listen to the replay, you can play at a slower speed because Dr. Jack is on fire.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:48:53]:
I love this stuff. I love the help. I mean, I love, you know, when we get these comments, you know, from people. Like, I’ve been seeing people and, you know, they never listened. And now, like, I got my life back. Right? I mean, I know you get all those compliments all the time. And it’s, you know, we’re not perfect. It’s a pretty difficult world that we’re in. I’m gonna stand up and start walking because my battery on my phone is dying. I’m gonna go get access in my car.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:49:17]:
So bear with me.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:49:18]:
Bear with me while I’m walking. But I can. I can walk and talk.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:49:21]:
Okay, awesome. Yeah, I’d like to revisit the. Looks pretty hot and sunny there, man.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:49:29]:
Oh, it’s gorgeous. It has been super hot here, but it’s supposed to get cooler next week, so we’re gonna be camping and it’s going to be in the mid-30s, but, you know, we’re prepared. We’re prepared. And I don’t know if I said this on the call or beforehand. It’s. It’s pretty darn cheap to be living outdoors. It’s not that expensive. You know, it’s kind of. It’s kind of rent free.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:49:53]:
Who needs a cold plunge when it’s 30 degrees out?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:49:56]:
Yeah, I’m definitely not doing cold plunges right now, that’s for sure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:50:00]:
So, yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit more to explain to. To our listeners, kind of what is the endothelial lining? Why it’s important how is. Because this is really where the crux of the issue is for cardiovascular health. It’s that endothelial intimal lining. So can you describe a little bit more about that, how it gets damaged and then, you know, ideally, what can we do about it?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:50:26]:
Yeah. So, you know, the.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:50:27]:
The lining of the blood vessels is called the endothelial. And the.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:50:34]:
That area is extremely important for a whole variety of reasons. And let me just start up my car here. Get some. Get some juice into the phone. All right, we’re good. Okay, Kit. Lining of the, you know, the blood vessels called the endothelium. And it really controls, you know, because the blood flow is going across it, you know, through. Through the tube. And then that initial lining is called the endothelium. And when it’s dysfunctional, when it’s not working, things get in that don’t belong. Setting up coronary artery Disease also leading to hypertension. Also circulatory issues where if the vessel is contracted because it’s not working again, you’re not going to have good blood flow, you’re going to have hypertension. This could be very common in women maybe who had preeclampsia and eclampsia or pregnancy induced hypertension. That would be it there. And it’s interesting that one product that we use a lot of from a supplement standpoint because it always starts with the foundation, right? It’s always about eat well, live well, think well, then test, don’t guess, evidence based supplements, the biohacking strategies. So the one particular supplement is called arterosil. A R T E R O S I L and that is a unique form of seaweed. And the magic there is that it’s very high in sulfur. So sulfur is animal products. Sulfur of course, creates glutathione and all the detox things that glutathione does. But sulfur is part of the, what’s called the glycocalyx on the inside of the endothelium. And it’s like this seaweed like layer that’s kind of swishing in the blood vessels. And it’s interesting that it’s a seaweed product that is a good product that helps this particular product and all. And I think again, erectile dysfunction in men and clitoral function in women is also predicated on that circulation. So that’s just another other place where we can get, you know, benefits from having a healthy endothelium, if you will. So I hope that clears things up.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:52:59]:
Yes, that does. Yeah. I don’t happen to use arterosil. I use Endocalyx Pro, which is very, very similar. It also has glucosamine sulfate in that. So you’re supporting the sulfation? Stephanie. Stephanie Setup talks about that too. The sulfation. Are you familiar with her?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:53:20]:
Yeah. And, and I love her work on that and I’ve learned a lot from her in that sense as well. And when I first heard about arterosil and it was, you know, said to me like, oh, they’ve got some data on, you know, plaque reversal and blood pressure and stuff like that. I said it’s got to have sulfur in it. Like it’s, I mean, there’s no other magic. It’s just got to be a hyper concentrated source of sulfur.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:53:41]:
Sulfur.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:53:42]:
And truth be told, I don’t believe that there’s any other magic to it outside of whatever kind of bioavailable sulfur that is. But you can do that. Of course. Why is garlic, onion, the brassica vegetables eating eggs, sulfur rich foods which are gonna be animal organs. You know, the seafood, that’s where that, you know, magic really happens. So yeah, I like it. And you know, listen, these products are expensive. You know, Arterosil and ocalyx, these are not tricky, cheap. If you got the money to add those to the regimen, great. And if not, just load up on those foods.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:54:20]:
I will say I’ve seen them turn around. Vaccine injuries like vascular vaccine injuries, hypertension vaccine injuries, the Endocalyx. So it may be that for a healthy person food is great. If you have a specific, specific endothelial issue, then you may want to consider doing the, the supplementation for targeted health.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:54:49]:
Well, especially if you, I mean if you are right, if you’re hypertensive, you know, then you know, I would rather take that than any hypertensive pharmaceutical, that’s for sure. You know, so. So I definitely think that, yeah, I mean if you’re able to do it, I think it is evidence based based supplementation. Arterosil, you know, they’ve got published data on plaque reversal, they’ve got published data on hypertension improvement. And in the one study that was done, diastolic blood pressure dropped by 10 points. So in the hypertensive, if you’re, if you’re hypotensive or your normal blood pressure, yeah, it’s not gonna be a problem. The other thing too is that as people look at the kind of like natural blood thinner remedies, you know, you’ve got the things like nattokinase, lumbrokinase, serrapeptase, those systemic enzymes. But then I also would throw in an arterosil or an Endocalyx to kind of add on to that. You’re not going to bleed to death from it. You don’t need to stop it for surgery. If you’re on anticoagulants, then be careful.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:55:59]:
There’s no medical advice.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:56:01]:
Well, yeah, no, I mean certainly, you know, check with your doctor if you want to but in the case of nattokinase and lumbrokinase, those would be not necessary when you’re on a pharmaceutical anticoagulant like Eliquis or Pradaxa or Xarelto because that truly is taking a knife to a machine gun like battle. Like it’s just, it’s probably not dangerous but it definitely is a waste of money because those are so, so strong. Arterosil, I’ve never had a problem with adding that to someone who is on any kind of anticoagulant or any kind of anti platele or even aspirin.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:39]:
So yeah, I don’t find that the Arterosil or the Endocalyx Pro have any sort of anticoagulation activity. It’s really more targeting that endothelial lining. Since we’re on the topic, what are some of your other favorite supplements that you like your cardiac patients to consider?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:56:59]:
Well, and also, I mean as far as like natural blood thinners. Yeah. Not that they’re going to bleed, but I think it prevents that kind of hypercoagulability or if you’ve got activated platelets or other fibrinogen type products. And you. But now you have this kind of, you know, Teflon, which is a horrible example, but a Teflon like layer on the inside of the blood vessels that helps prevent that sticky blood and including in the atria of the heart that I think would have some efficacy in people with atrial fibrillation. If they don’t want to take pharmaceutical anticoagulants, that they would have that as well. Other supplements, I’m a huge organ supplement guy. We do personally, we’ve got an organ supplement which is unvaccinated field harvested bison liver and heart. We also have wild salmon roe in a capsule. So I love the food as medicine. I love oral phosphatidylcholine. I love emu oil, which is very high in vitamin K2. The Shilajit tar is another one of our favorites. Right. That, you know, decayed Himalayan plant matter. I like that. I like a good quality probiotic. I like binders, as do you. So kind of like starting at that foundational approach, I think is. I think is really good. You know, if there’s other advanced detox, right. It all comes into the individual person. I don’t know what else. What are some of your favorites?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:58:33]:
So I like antioxidants, right. Because we’re talking about anti oxidative stress as one of the drivers. We have a product that’s resveratrol and turmeric and andrographis and broccoli seed extract. Right. So you’re getting a little bit. It’s called resvoxitrol. So oftentimes I’ll be using that with people too. Remember, oxidative stress is managed by our internal antioxidant enzyme system. So that’s what we’re born with. And then our diet and our supplements, which we’re taking, hopefully to help combat the oxidative stress. And if we have not enough antioxidants or enzymes to do the job and too much oxidative stress. We’re going to get that oxidized LDL, F2 isoprostane, myeloperoxidase. And so therefore, we have to one figure out what the root cause is and then try and mitigate things as best we can.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [00:59:36]:
Yeah, no, I love that. You know, and then also now that you made me think about it, right. I mean, so you mentioned resveratrol, curcumin, the, you know, ginger, the green tea extracts, berberine. All those things are very good for people that want, you know, they don’t want to go on statins, but they want like a little bit of something that helps com. You know, helps to remove the old LDL particles out of circulation to help improve with oxidative stress. So I think all those things are good. And then also things that naturally boost the nitric oxide system. So, you know, organic beetroot powder, for example, is very high, you know, highly concentrated with organic nitrates which convert into nitrites and then into nitric oxide in the acidic stomach. And then also things like lrc, arginine, citrulline, taurine. Taurine has some great data on as well. Of course, it’s found in meat. But that arginine, citrulline, those are, you know, those plug into nitric oxide synth base that synthesizes the nitric oxide vasodilator. And really, I mean, kind of like that, that combination right there, that’s sometimes with the men, I refer to that as the boner juice. And the boner juice cranks up levels of nitric oxide. And that’s what Viagra is. Viagra was invented as a blood pressure drug. And then Pfizer, as they’re studying it, they had this interesting side effect in men. And then they’re like, well, who cares about blood pressure now we’ve got the blue pill. But it’s interesting that even in women that there’s evidence that nitric oxide, improving nitric oxide support helps with female libido, clitoral erections, orgasm and stuff like that. So some people may find that information useful.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:19]:
Yes, yes. Oh, I have one more question and then we’ll jump into our Q and A. What about bergamot? Do you ever use bergamot?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:01:29]:
You know, I was introduced to it early on in my holistic career and I used it and I never really found it to be very effective. So I’m not down on. On it. It’s just not one of my Top choices if somebody wants to try it and check, you know, whatever kind of parameter maybe it is, a lipid profile, you know, at time zero, and then check it at 60 or 90 days to see how it did. It’s not really big on my list.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:59]:
Yeah, I mean, I found occasionally it might move the needle a little bit. It’s. The medical literature looks great that it’s supposed to help lower cholesterol and modulate your blood sugars, but I. In practice, I haven’t really seen that it’s happened like that, so.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:02:17]:
And it’s kind of. It’s kind of expensive, too, you know, so. Yeah, I mean, like I said, you know, we all have our. Like, our top 10 and our top 20 list. It’s not. It’s not really on mine. I’m not opposed to it, but. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:02:30]:
Okay, thanks. All right, let’s jump in. So Hannah asked, please touch on loans. Proximal atrial fibrillation and what a patient can do to get rid of it. So lone afib.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:02:46]:
Yeah, so. And this really applies to anybody with irregular heart rhythms. So what they would say is lone afib means, like, oh, we don’t know why.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:02:54]:
Right. You’re not hypertensive.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:02:55]:
There’s no cardiac problem, leaky heart valves or whatever. But again, there’s always a cause. So we just view everything through the lens of, you know, too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good stuff. Start with the eat well, live well, think well, test, don’t guess. So, intracellular magnesium, intracellular potassium, omega 3s, you know, all the B vitamins, for example, oxidative stress, inflammation. So all the things that we do helps everything, including lone afib, and we tend to be very successful with that. Permanent AFIB can be more difficult. But I will say this. Even if you have permanent afib, I’m not going to guarantee that we’re going to get you out of that, that’s for sure. Sure. But if you have afib, you also have a higher risk of cancer. Now, AFIB doesn’t cause cancer, but whatever causes AFIB also causes cancer. So you better fix the root cause. You may not get rid of the AFib, but you will prevent cancer. It also, AFIB is linked to dementia, doesn’t necessarily cause dementia, but again, they’re linked. So fixing, you know, doing our best to fix, you know, will be helpful. The other thing, oftentimes people with afib, they go for cardioversions, they go for ablations. But before any kind of procedure, we want to make you the healthiest version of you. Because if it’s just the same old you prior to a cardioversion or ablation, it’s not going to work. But if we change you, if we make you the best version of you, it’s going to be helpful.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:04:25]:
It’s really interesting that you said that, because our previous webinar, Dr. Dane Goodenow, who’s a PhD biochemist, who talked about plasmalogens, I had him specifically talk to this idea that when people are low in the phospholipid plasmalogens, they are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia and cancer. And so maybe it’s a little so. And then if you’re not Familiar with it, Dr. Jack and for those people who weren’t on, on Dr. Goodenow’s webinar, let me just give you a little teaser. Plasmalogens are phospholipids, like PC that we’ve been talking about. They have a slightly different structure, which gives them more unique qualities. They do three major things in the body. They represent 90% of myelin, which helps with the nerves. Right. That protects the nerves. They release neurotransmitters in the synapses in the brain. So without plasmalogens, we literally can’t release our neurotransmitters. We can’t make connections in our brain. That’s the dementia piece. But the most important thing that they do is they are the most used antioxidants in the body. So the body will sacrifice its plasmalogens due to oxidative stress. And plasmalogens are made in the peroxisome in the cell. So we only have enough nutrients to go around the peroxisomes, which are in an organelle like the mitochondria. They’re churning out their plasmalogens. And if we’re using them up faster than we can make them, we’re going to get deficient. We use them up faster than we make them when we have oxidative stress. And so there’s the connection. Maybe everybody just needs a little bit more building blocks of plasmalogens.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:06:19]:
And as I understand it, and I can’t tell you where I’ve heard this before, but I’ve heard that one of the best food sources of plasmogens are scallops.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:29]:
Yes.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:06:30]:
So I’m a huge scallop. I’m a huge, you know, seafood person in general. But that’s one place, I believe, where, where you can really get some excellent food sources of that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:40]:
Yeah. The challenge is that a lot of the food sources get broken Down. But you know, when there is actually a test, you can do a plot. It’s a blood test, prodrome scan. When you do the blood test, it looks at your omegas, so omega 3 fatty acids. It looks at the amount of phosphatidylcholine and the other phospholipid, phosphatidyl and ethanolamine, which are in your hopefully good PC body bioproduct your PC and then we make them. So if we don’t have enough building blocks, we can’t make it. And then yes, scallops are a good source. There’s actually a supplement that’s a scallop source and then there’s the prodrome supplement, supplements that Dr. Good now makes. And I think they work really well. I think they can be very, very helpful. I digress. So I’m gonna get back to you. Dr. Jack.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:07:40]:
No, no, no, no, no. That’s all, that’s all excellent info. And I think it really just goes back to, you know, also just these high quality fats that, you know, we should be consuming, you know, as those building blocks to make things happen internally. And I think also to your point too, it’s like a lot of people take a lot of, you know, different supplements and like, oh, I’m still inflammation claimed, you know, I’m still deficient in these different vitamins. It’s like, well, you know, it’s kind of like if, you know, you’re driving along on the highway and you’re like, oh, I gotta get gas. Why do I need gas again? I just put gas in the car. Well, you’re, you know, your car utilizes all of that fuel. Your body utilizes all of this fuel. So, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s like you got to keep, you know, replenishing it because the world is so poisonous.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:23]:
Yeah, it is. It is very poisonous. So. So bottom line is do as much as you can to mitigate and lessen your exposures and, you know, take the nutrients that you need on top of a healthy diet. Okay, I’m going to keep going. Are you concerned about metals that were exposed to from chemtrails? Aluminum, strontium, barium, et cetera.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:08:47]:
I’m definitely, you know, concerned about chemtrails. I mean, that’s, that’s for sure. And it’s kind of interesting too. It’s like whether you believe in chemtrail, whether, whether someone in your life believes in them or not, and they’re like, oh, that’s all, you know, condensation trails. It’s affecting our sky and it is blocking the sun and is blocking the fact that the sun should be hitting our skin. AKA our solar panel built to collect light. So whatever is going up on in the skies, nefarious or not, it is clearly a problem. And to the point of this is why we do the best that we can. You know, in a toxic world, some of the, well, I want to avoid emf. What are you going to do when there are thousands of satellites that are launched, you know, into the atmosphere, just raining down non native, you know, electromagnetic fields? I mean we’re where it’s, you know, we’re being poisoned at every turn and that’s why we have to do our best to do these. And that’s where you break, you know, Dr. Kelly, where these evidence based supplements, you know, come in where it’s like as much as you eat well, live well, think well, you need this extra support, otherwise you’re just, you’re not going to make it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:01]:
Right? Right. Sad but true. And yes, we can still have hope and we can still put on our tinfoil hats. What do you think? Well, what is a good coronary calcium score? Is anything over zero, bad?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:10:20]:
I mean listen, you know, the higher the number, the, the higher the risk, you know, that’s for sure. You know, and typically in the standard, it’s kind of like anything below 100, you know, would be lower risk that like you know, one to 400, 400 to a thousand, above 1,000. But you know, I think also too, I try and tell people that, you know, you may have the single worst coronary artery disease in the world. You may have the worst and the highest score, but if you’re not having symptoms, well there’s nothing imminently to worry about. And if you are having symptoms, do we deal with it with natural supplements, you know, natural vasodilators, pharmaceutical, you know, products, vasodilators. Or do we deal with it, you know, with stents or bypass surgery? Stents and bypass surgery are really for people with symptoms. They’re not for people with asymptomatic coronary artery disease disease. And then you know, from there, if you have the worst coronary artery disease in the world, how do we prevent it from getting worse? More importantly, how do we prevent one of those plaques from becoming unstable? Erosion, rupture, myocardial infarction, that’s what we do. So it may not be, the goal is, well, how do I reverse coronary artery calcification? The goal should be how do we prevent plaque rupture and if we keep our inflammation and oxidative stress low, then that is our best strategy to prevent plaque rupture or erosion leading to heart attack.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:56]:
And then piggybacking on that, would you say, additionally making sure that you’re on some sort of. Of anti. Like nattokinase Baluk. So addressing the hypercoagulability piece as well.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:12:11]:
I don’t think there’s much of a downside to that. The question is, right, is it on, like your top 10 supplement list?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:12:18]:
Yeah, I’m asking.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:12:20]:
Yeah, I mean, like me. And maybe, maybe the answer is yes. Maybe it is like around number eight, nine or 10, you know, for that, again, whether it’s Endocalyx or Arturacil, I would probably reach for those before a Baluc lumbrokinase or Nattokinase. But it’s on the list. And the way that you take those, of course, is, you know, two to three times per day away from food would be the best strategy, you know, with that. If you’ve already had a cardiac event, well, then it probably takes it up, you know, much higher, you know, on that list to be using a product like that, you know, that’s one of the. You know, I’m thinking about you. I’m thinking about Fermentation Farm in Costa Mesa and also in San Juan Capistrano. And they sell the organic fermented soy product called Natto. And I’m not a big soy guy, but I think there may be some. Obviously there’s data on the Japanese who live seven years longer than we do, and because they eat that fermented food, Natto, that does contain nattokinase in there, that they may be one of their longevity strategies. And of course, nattokinase is also. Excuse me, Natto is very high in vitamin K2, very high in K2, which again, as we said before, keeps calcium in the bones and out of the arteries.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:39]:
Okay, few more questions. What do you think about regular saunas in the gym? Do they eliminate toxins and should you take a binder to catch any toxins not eliminated through the sweat?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:13:51]:
Yes, love the binder aspect of which there, of course, there are many. There’s not really a lot of data that I’ve seen as far as the binding capability of chlorella spirulina. But that’s often. I mean, I believe it to be a superfood, you know, no doubt about it. You know, so kind of like taking that before, during and after staying hydrated, of course, very important. But the literature on the Good old fashioned sweat box comes from Finland. It comes from the Finnish data. And the people who use sauna in Finland four to seven times per week versus those who use it once or less per week, the group that uses it 4 to 7 have a 77, 0% lower risk of being dead over a 20 year period. That’s pretty dramatic. So I do like, I do like sauna for a whole variety of reasons, you know. Right. Just, you know, kind of a time for relaxation. Be careful about bringing tech into the sauna. Like that means don’t even like books or magazines. Those can off gas of course into the stuff that you’re breathing. So you want to have that sauna to be kind of like that, you know, that chamber of peace and solace. Good time just to be alone with your thoughts. Right. You know, realizing how boring you are when you’re like, oh, I’m in here, I don’t have anything to think about. But then you find stuff to think about and it turns out you’re not that boring.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:12]:
Back to afib. So somebody had afib who was in mold. Now in a safe place but still working to stabilize anything else you would add to the previous conversation if there’s mold involved.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:15:29]:
Yeah. You know, again, you always want to make sure you’re out of mold. You always want to look at the emf, you know, so you’re looking at turning off the wi fi night, looking at, you know, unplugging certain things. So kind of again, because that electromagnetic fields, that impact of what it does to your electromagnetic field and your electrical rhythms is, is definitely a factor. Another, you know, household toxin that’s common carbon monoxide. Make sure you’re not living in carbon monoxide. Radon could play a role, but as it relates to other supplements, I think you’re really just do the super duper deep dive on the testing. And at a minimum, if you’ve got inflammation, stress, you better figure out why because those are highly correlated to atrial fibrillation. And then just check for those deficiencies and improve on them. Including like you said, whether it’s the plasmologens eating the seafood, the scallops, the free range grass fed meats, including the organs, the eggs, healing the gut, microbiome. It really is all about, you know, all about, you know, and the more you do all of it, the better you’re gonna do. And even though you may not get rid of the afib in total, you again, you know, you’ll prevent something else. And then again, just going back to chiropractic balancing the autonomic nervous system. We know that stress, anger, anxiety, depression are all linked to AFIB risk.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:16:59]:
Fascinating. All right, this one is a setup. What kind of coffee do you recommend that’s free of my toxins?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:17:07]:
All right, so. So shameless plug. We do have a brand called cardiology coffee, cardiologycoffee.com and it’s really a great product. It’s sold on Amazon. It’s sold@CardiologyCoffee.com I used to speak on behalf of another coffee company. Company. And it was all about the cardiac benefits because so many people are told not to drink coffee, right? Your doctor says, don’t drink coffee. And you know this, Kelly, right? So we go back into the doctor’s lounge and then we have coffee, which is crap coffee out of a styrofoam cup. But we told somebody else, you know, not to. I mean, I remember, like, when I was a medical resident, I’m running to a code in the middle of the night, you know, and I’m like, I stop at the nurse’s station. I do a quick slug in the middle of the night. So we drink the best coffee. Mold, mycotoxin free, very important, organic and pesticide glyphosate free. Ours is tested for all that because I drink that and my wife drinks that. Not as much, certainly, as I do. I probably have like three to four cups every morning. Recent studies showed that people who drink coffee three to four cups prior to noon have a much lower risk of dying. Again, the cardiovascular data is there. We get our coffee, single source, from Honduras. It’s a women’s co op. So, you know, it helps to support the Honduran women. And we also donate 5% of all revenue. Not profit, revenue directly. Top line goes to a group called Friends of Honduran Children. I vetted that organization to make sure they’re not just sending, you know, the money down there for flu shots and other poison for the kids down there. And like, no, they’re building. They’re building housing. They’re teaching them actually healthy farming practices. This is because, believe it or not, a lot of these third world Central American countries, I mean, they’re feeding the kids just poison, absolute poison. And it’s horrific. So, yeah, that’s the Cardiology coffee. So that’s the shameless plug for that. And it’s a delicious coffee, whatever.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:11]:
So, yeah, it is delicious. I’ve had it, too.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:19:15]:
Thank you. Thank you, sister. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:18]:
Okay, I know that there are tests for leaky Gut. Are there tests for leaky heart? That’s an interesting question.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:19:25]:
The answer directly. The answer is no. You know, obviously, indirectly, as we said, but. But that’s the surrogate. Now, you could also do nitric oxide salivary testing. There is an advanced test called the Endopath, which is a $30,000 system. It’s kind of painful, cumbersome, that looks for, you know, what’s called vascular reactivity. That gives you a surrogate marker for the endothelium itself. You could do again, cimt, that’s difficult to reproduce. I would just say if you have leaky gut, you definitively have leaky blood vessels, leaky brain. Leaky, leaky everything. It’s just all. All of your organs, your cells itself, become leaky.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:20:10]:
Right.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:20:10]:
You mentioned a leaky organism, cells, you mentioned those peroxisomes, you mentioned the mitochondria. It’s all played in together. It’s all damaged. So, yeah, we need to repair it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:21]:
Great. Okay. Spear asked, can you overcome congestive heart failure?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:20:27]:
Yes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:20:29]:
Can you elaborate more?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:20:32]:
I mean. I mean, again, it’s just, you know, if you have congestive heart failure, you. You definitely, you definitely can improve. Not always, but you can normalize. And we’ve done this many, many times. The only time where you definitively would have trouble normalizing ejection fraction would be someone who’s had a heart attack, someone who’s had, you know, damage done. There is scar tissue there, but I truly believe that somebody can live until they’re 100, 125, whatever that number is, with the heart function they have. You just want to prevent another event. You want to prevent that from getting worse. And again, that’s what we’ve seen. So if your ejection fraction is not the normal 50 to 55%, if it is 20 to 25 to 30, 35%, we may not improve the number, but we may be able to improve on your symptoms and your longevity. We just want to prevent another event, if that makes sense, which I know it does.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:41]:
Yes, it does. Do you see? Do you take patients either in person or remotely? One of the participants?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:21:51]:
I. I do. I do. So I do remote consultations because of my personal living situation where we bounce around. It is mostly virtual or remote, which I’ve been doing since 2012. Right. And just same as you, people come from all over the world. World, you know, to see us, and they go back to wherever they’re from. And then we do things, you know, back in the day with Skype and phone. Now it’s all done on zoom. It’s all recorded. I also have two other practitioners and a new cardiologist who joined me. But I’ve got two naturopathic medical doctors. They’re fantastic. So, you know, for those of you out there, you know, with cardiac specific issues, you know, you want us to help you, you know, that’s great, but it’s going to wind up being a lot of, you know, a lot of the same Recommendations you recommend, Dr. Kelly. Right. As far as, hey, it’s all root cause medicine. Take away the bad stuff, get more of the good stuff. That’s the answer.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:22:46]:
Well, this particular person is in Arizona.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:22:49]:
So I think, oh yeah, we are, we are in Scottsdale. So yes, I do see people in person. I happen to be in town right now. And again, our naturopathic docs are, are just stellar, stellar, you know, trained under me for years and, and they’re all good.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:23:08]:
So fantastic. Thank you. Please comment on how and if Bartonella, Lyme and other CO infections affect the small blood vessels, especially in the brain.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:23:21]:
I mean, the answer is, you know, that they do. But I think it goes back to our ancestors were exposed, they came from the elements, they lived outdoors. So they would have been exposed, exposed to, you know, Borrelia, AKA Lyme. They would have been exposed to these other, what are now called CO infections. And when your immune system is damaged, you can’t deal with the bacteria, the parasites, the viruses, the protozoa, these, these other things that can impact us. So I’ve always been someone about how do we boost up the immune system, how do we fix the immune system to go after these particular potential pathogens. That’s always been my root of how I work as a cardiologist. I’ve seen acute Lyme carditis. I’ve seen the 20 year old kid who was camping in Wisconsin and then he returns to Chicago land where I was trained. And that kid’s got a heart rate of 20, he’s in complete heart block. We put in a temporary pacemaker, we load him up with antibiotics, everybody gets nervous for a few days and then he goes home and enjoys the rest of his life. But this kind of chronic Lyme, these chronic infections, I think it is an immunodeficiency. And the answer starts with fixing the immune system.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:24:45]:
Right. I agree it’s a total load issue and it can be driven by these infections, but it can also be because of a moldy situation, oxidative stress, immune dysfunction, etc. So very complicated. What supplements do you recommend for lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:25:07]:
So you know, we do have that kind of boner juice combo. We do call that heartbeat and vessel support. So it’s two of those.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:25:14]:
So the women don’t have to take boner juice.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:25:18]:
Some of the women benefit from the boner juice. But the boner juice does help with blood pressure, that’s for sure. Because it’s all nitric oxide boosters. It’s all, it’s all, it’s all boosting up nitric oxide levels. That is a natural vaso dilator. Chiropractic care has proven to lower blood pressure by 17 over 10. So see your chiropractor. Other things from a supplement. Again, Arterosil has data you can use Endocalyx, you know, gonna work very effectively. Magnesium salt baths, oral magnesium products, potassium products, B vitamins, antioxidants, you know, you know, again, those, those food based things. You know, I love the wild salmon roe as just a source of omega 3 fatty acids from food. And then there are some herbal remedies. Like one of which is called carditone, which is an herbal remedy and that contains the main ingredient in there probably is something. It’s an herbal remedy known as Raufuia serpentina. And that was one of the original pharmaceuticals, reserpine that was used in the 50s and 60s with side effects. So again, that’s where that comes in and the cardinal. And that’s kind of really like a last ditch effort. And then, you know, don’t forget blood pressure is a problem over years. The higher the pressure over the number of years is equal to a higher risk. And even then, high blood pressure is a sign that your body has an excess of bad, not enough of the good. It’s not really a disease entity of itself, although mainstream medical makes you believe that it is, because that’s how we’re trained by pharmaceutical companies, so we can sell their drugs. But it’s really not a problem in and of itself. It’s more of an underlying sign. And that’s why blood pressure drugs don’t work. Because blood pressure drugs may lower numbers down, but they have very limited efficacy in preventing heart attacks, strokes and being dead. So just like statin drugs can dramatically change numbers, they have very little impact on the stuff that matters. You don’t take a pharmaceutical, oh, congratulations, my blood pressure. You know, your, congratulations. Your number is, you know, now normal. You get this free bowl of soup or ice cream cone. You don’t, you take a drug because you think it’s going to help prevent heart attack, stroke and dying. And those drugs do not do that.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:27:44]:
We only have time for a couple more questions. Could Dr. Wolfson and Dr. McCann tie much of what you’ve covered today to the heart valves or valvular health? Because we really haven’t talked about the valves too much. So thank you, anonymous attendee for asking.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:27:59]:
Yes, well, I mean, I’ll take a stab at that. Again, like a lot of times women too, especially in the 80s and 90s when you and I were just specifically in the 90s doing our training, but a lot of women were labeled with mitral valve prolapse and years later on ultrasound, turns out 90 plus percent of the time they didn’t have mitral valve prolapse. What happened was these women were coming into the doctor’s offices in circa 1985, 1995 or even today. They’ve got palpitations, flip flops, PACs. Dr. Heard something. Oh, it’s mitral valve prolapse and you know, live with it. Right? Well, that wasn’t the case, so. But there are people who definitely do have leaky heart valve valves. And I think that everything we do helps to kick the can down the road on definitive therapy for the prolapse or for a leaky heart valve or for a tight valve. But also what we do is that if you are going to go for a procedure to repair a valve or replace a valve, we make you the healthiest version of you. So the perioperative period is least, you know, the least amount of complications and also the long term success. If we make you the healthiest version of you, that repaired valve, that replaced valve will more likely last a very long time compared to the person who eats McDonald’s cookies and cupcakes, drinks too much booze and the valve is not going to last very long.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:29:33]:
Got it. Last question. Would you talk a little big explosion at the end? Would you talk about mycotoxins causing ventricular arrhythmias that could lead to heart arrest or cardiac arrest?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:29:47]:
Yeah, I mean, I mean, it’s just a reality, right? It’s just for the reasons we said before is that the disruption of the gut microbiome would be one way that.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:29:58]:
It would do it.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:29:58]:
Of course, you know, breathing in mycotoxins, you know, is obviously a big factor. Even absorption mycotoxins through your skin, all those things are gonna play a role. And then ultimately you have this inflammation, oxidative stress, and, and therefore vitamin mineral nutrient deficiencies, and that’s gonna lead to an irritable myocardium, including in the ventricle leading to ventricular arrhythmias, ventricular dysrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, potentially V fib, cardiac arrest. And how many people are walking around now with these conditions? They’ve got a defibrillator in place. They’re on five different pharmaceuticals, you know, for this, when the entire time it was because of water damage in their home. And it’s just very, very sad that the medical community doesn’t get this education. But that’s where you and I Come in, Dr. Kelly, is that we continue to, you know, chip away and really also just educating the public, you know, on this as well. So the public goes back to their doctor and saying, you’re not helping me. I’m going outside the box with Dr. McCann to figure this out. Because you’re not going to. And again, it’s not because they’re not intelligent. It’s like, Kelly, if you and I went to, you know, I’ll speak for myself. If I go to France and I’m walking around and they’re like, wow, that guy is an idiot. He doesn’t speak our language. He doesn’t know, you know, a stop sign or what’s going on. He can’t order any. That guy’s not intelligent. Intelligent. Again, I’m not. It’s not because I’m not intelligent. No one ever taught me to speak French. No one ever taught these doctors to go after root cause. Right from day one, it was like, I can’t wait to prescribe my first medication. I can’t wait to do my first surgical procedure. The drug reps come in. Here’s all the samples. Here’s the free food. Let’s go out golfing. Let’s go smoke some cigars. Let’s go out for happy hour. That’s just the way that it was and the way that a lot of training, probably not as bad now, but it still is pharma controlled. And it’s not. It’s no longer considered conspiracy. It’s just reality, right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:32:04]:
Yes. Yes. And I would be curious to tap your brain a little bit more, maybe offline or grab some of the literature about the links. Are you able to, like, take this information and link it with medical literature to prove a case, for example?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:32:24]:
Yes. You know, so. And unfortunately, and you know this as well, the medical literature is much more geared towards the production of positive data on statin drugs or blood pressure drugs or all these biologics and stuff like that, which is just highway robbery in a $1.5 trillion pharmaceutical industry. But I do have links on my website where I talk about mold and mycotoxins and cardiovascular disease. I talk about it very extensively and most of which really, I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll go back to my wife on this one where she’s like, the only thing you should be talking about, you know, is, is molds impact. So produce a lot of video, a lot of content. And I will say this, you know, to anyone who’s listening, if you want to email me because you’re looking for again a specific thing or you’re look, you know, you’re not finding the information, the data on my website, website, or you want me to write a particular piece on it, like, I’ll do it. You know, if you’re like, well, you know, there’s no data, you know, you don’t have anything about mold and mitral valve prolapse, like, I mean again, it’s, I can always make that case quite simply through it’s just the mycotoxins that, that leaky gut, intestinal hyperpermeability and then boom, we’re off to the races. So, and again, it is in the medical literature about how mold mycotoxins impact the gut microbiome change, intestinal permeability, lyn linked to inflammation, oxidative stress, immune dysfunction, autonomic dysfunction. So once you say, okay, well now we know that mold is leading to those things and those things are linked to a medical condition, then that’s it. And any judge, jury or medical doctor or even your spouse has to, you know, wake up to that reality.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:34:14]:
Wow, this has been so much fun. I could keep talking with you and I’m sure our listeners would love to that but in being honorable of everyone’s time, thank you so much, Dr. Wolfson for being here, for being so enthusiastic, for working outside of the box to really help bring people’s awareness of their own ability to heal their health and heal their hearts and keep themselves safe. Where can people find you?

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:34:48]:
Well, and let me again say thank you to you for being such a leader in this industry and all the stuff you’ve done, you know, through summits and promotions and even, you know, having a podcast like this, taking the time out of your busy day to educate people. And it really is, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, people like you, doctors like you who really, you know, are making the difference. And again, I appreciate the time. My website’s Natural Heart Doctor. We’re on, you know, TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and stuff like that. If you want to find me, it’s there. Yeah. So, again, I’m just so appreciative.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:35:23]:
You’re welcome. Thank you. And if people want to see you in the clinic, they can. There’s access to the clinic there, too.

Dr. Jack Wolfson [01:35:31]:
Yes. Yes, there is. Yes, there is. And I’m happy. I’m happy to help. And, you know, again, you know, thank you. And it’s just, I mean, it’s unfortunate because, I mean, I’d like to be able to say I’m going to train more cardiologists. Cardiologists. It’s just, you know, the cardiology profession, I mean, it’s so lucrative. You’re so indoctrinated in that methodology. I just. I’ve struggled to find other colleagues, you know, who are similar. So I’ve always decided to kind of like, stay in the game, to be able to help people individually, you know, just like you. You know, it’s like you have to invest financially to work with me. And that’s only because there’s so much time in our day. But I think also that will really provide an extreme value for that investment. And if it’s not with me, I’ve got other associate practitioners as well who are absolutely just brilliant, great people too. So there you go.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:24]:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and thank you everybody for hanging out with us and listening. Just FYI, if you didn’t hear this before, we will send out the replay. You can listen more slow speed next time if you need to. For those of you who found we were talking a little bit too fast, there will also be a transcript that you can read if that’s easier for you. And just FYI, on our next webinar, we will be talking with the Spring Center’s own Lauren Lasen, one of my PAs. She will be talking about the immune system and vagus nerve approaches for boosting the immune system. Look forward to seeing you all. That will be February 2020 8th at 11am thank you so much again. Bye, everyone.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Dr. Dayan Goodenowe on our most recent webinar. Dr. Goodenowe and I delved into the revolutionary science of plasmalogens, critical phospholipids essential for brain, heart, and cellular health. We discussed how restoring plasmalogen levels can reverse brain aging, enhance cognitive function, and protect against chronic conditions like dementia, heart disease, and cancer. Dr. Goodenowe explained their role as the body’s preferred antioxidants, their connection to mitochondrial health, and their profound regenerative potential. Real-life case studies illustrate how targeted plasmalogen supplementation can dramatically improve health outcomes, even in severe conditions like long COVID, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.

This must-watch session is packed with actionable insights for anyone looking to restore health and vitality at the cellular level.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:02]:
Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for spending a couple of hours with myself and my guest today, who is a brilliant scientist and inventor and somebody I highly respect, because he’s going to blow your mind. This is Dr. Dayan Goodenowe. He is a PhD neuroscientist, biochemist, synthetic organic chemist, inventor, and research expert. Way back in 99, he invented and patented a revolutionary technology for resonance mass spec, which made it possible to monitor human biochemistry comprehensively for the very first time in history. And using this advanced technology, he analyzed blood samples from tens of thousands of people of all ages, races, and multiple countries. And we were able to identify what was healthy and what was different about people suffering from disease. And as a result of that, he learned a great number of details and amazing information about how we can help identify what these issues are in people and shift them into a healthier state. Anything from autism to dementia, cancers, heart disease, et cetera. And so I’m so excited to have a conversation with you today.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:01:35]:
Well, thank you, Kelly. It’s very. I’m very happy to be here.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:01:39]:
So let’s dive in. I had never learned about the phospholipids called plasma before. I read your book and listened to your lectures for practitioners, and I was just in awe and blown away. So maybe, if you don’t mind, give us a little bit of understanding of what plasmaogens are and why we should care.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:02:12]:
Thank you very much. Yeah, so it’s interesting because I could come at this from a traditional medical biotech perspective. Right. So I’m formally trained as a medicinal chemist and as a scientist, and I think all of us do when we get our first initial training, we kind of build upon the premise of all the other research that we’ve done. Right. And the focus of research for the last 50, 60 years has really been understanding disease. And we. So we compare individual with a disease to a control to understand the differences, and the focus is on treating that disease. Right. We have symptoms of disease, and we try to. We kind of try to come in there and actively attack one receptor or another. And this is where all this, these drugs that we have, Right. And many of them are very, very useful, of course. But I think there’s been this disconnect in our community and in everyday lives, like everyday people, they recognize that we’re treating disease and we’re treating symptoms, and people are living longer in, in a, in an unhealthy state. And so we’re, we’re basically prolonging this morbidity, if you will, or this poor Health through this. And something just doesn’t connect with people. And I’m in the same category as that because as a technology developer and scientist, these advanced mass spectrometry technologies, I originally was developing them for traditional work. How do I diagnose a disease? Do we get a screening test for breast cancer or screening test for dementia with the intent that it would be used in the conjunction with traditional medicine? Right. Because that’s what I was taught. And at some point in time, when you get through this, you realize, for me, anyways, it’s just the vastness of data in the clinical trials was that we’re missing this early stage of disease or this prodrome or really this deviation from health and the. You know, because you just don’t walk down the street and get hit with a bolt of lightning and. And all of a sudden you can’t remember where your keys are. Right? It doesn’t. It doesn’t happen that way. Like it. And we all know that, right? We see this slow progression, and it’s this difference between this deviation from health versus this disease process. And people often have a concept of disease like the 30s and the 40s, where you get an infection, right? Like a bacterial infection or a viral infection. That’s what we typically perceive as some external force acting on us to cause this disease, which is different than you losing health. Right? So the concept of disease being some sort of thing that’s been thrust upon you versus something that you’ve lost is a different concept. And so when we’re looking at these molecules, and plasma in particular, it’s a phospholipid that’s critical for your brain and heart. But this came from this concept of measuring this deviation from health and understanding do these things occur before we see symptoms of a disease? And so when you get a symptom of disease, you typically have both the disease symptoms, but also the underlying biochemical causation that got you there in the first place. And this is where I think our public health systems and this ability to look at prevention or restorative health fails us. So these plasma molecules came from that. And so it was kind of a building block process of identifying these molecules as being deficient in people with dementia, with cancer, with certain leukodystrophies in children, and then scientifically dig into them and saying, is this just a cause? Is the disease actually causing these things to be depleted, or are they somehow being depleted first and this subsequent disease comes after? And as you dig into this myself, include, like you say, well, you’ve never heard of plasmas. Well, I didn’t, I wasn’t taught plasmas in school either. I wasn’t. I had no idea what these things were. They showed up on the mass spectrometry as being depleted in these diseases and highly predictive of future DYS dysfunction. So of course my role as a scientist is to dig into what are these things, where do they come from? Why haven’t I, why, why wasn’t I taught about plasmologies in university? When I’m talking about all these diseases, like, and then, then you realize like it’s been sitting there right in your face for the last hundred years now. Like they’ve been, they were discovered in 1919, I think they originally discovered. And we have all this work in the 60s on these alkyl glycerols and plasma precursors. And, and we have these children with diseases with like Zellweger’s or leukodystrophies or rhizome dysplasia punctata. So we’ve known about these diseases that have genetic impairments in plasmaogen manufacturing. So these children have, they can’t make enough plasmas and they die. Like if you have, if you have a serious plasma deficiency, you won’t make it past your first few years of life. Like they’re that obligate to human life. So it’s not like we didn’t know about these things even. It’s funny, I do these studies, these presentations on early childhood development and you know, breastfeeding versus non breastfeeding and stuff like that, because plasmas are actually part of breast milk. And what differentiates human breast milk say from formula and why we see these different rates of certain diseases, immune function in children that are breast milk, especially exclusively for the first six months. And we’ve, these are papers from the 60s and the 70s that they’re talking about this stuff, right? This is not brand new information. Right. And even then they were tracking how much the plasma levels increase. Like when the children are born. We’re all born kind of plasma allergen deficient. So our brains have a bunch of white matter, which is this connectivity tissue and they’re highly made up of plasma allergens. And so you start with a little bit and then you’re, you massively build them up so that 30, 40%, you know, of the fossil lipids of your entire brain are plasmogen. Over 50% of the phospholipids in your heart are plasmaogens. Okay. In your lung. So these are not trace level molecules, they’re part of the synaptic. And so when we’re talking about fossil lipids. Okay, so I’m jumping into things and so what is a fossil? Right, and so.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:08:23]:
Thank you. I was going to ask you that. So perfect.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:08:25]:
It’s kind of like a soap. Like, so when you, when you, you, when you soap, you use to dissolve oil and water basically. And so phospholipids are these molecules that have a polar side group that make them hydrophilic or they like water and they have these large non polar groups which are the fatty acid change which like oil. And so that’s how a soap basically dissolves oil in water because this calls an emulsification. But so phospholipids are what the body uses to create membranes which are basically the walls and they self organize cell membranes.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:08:59]:
And.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:08:59]:
Yeah, it’s called a phospholipid bilayer. So the fatty acid non polar chains link together like this and the polar groups link out here and it creates essentially a biological wall that’s impervious to water. So all these cells of your body, and you have lots of them, like you have 30 trillion cells in the human body and each one of them and another 20, 30 trillion in your, in your gut. So that’s what we’re made of, these massive amount of cells. And then that’s not just the end of it, because inside all your cells you’ll have multiple subcellular organelles like your mitochondria and your peroxisomes, your Golgi apparatus, your nucleus. All of these things are compartmentalized using membranes. Okay. And it’s basically like your house, right? If you want to cook something in your kitchen and you don’t want to smell it in the living room, you have a wall and you, you can, you can isolate things in one area and other areas. So you can actually do certain activities in one part of your body that don’t affect other parts. So this whole compartmentalization isolation we do by membranes. And of course we have doors and windows and we have ways that molecules pass in and out of these things. And so there’s, you know, these pores or receptors that interact. And so all those things we call proteins people talk about are embedded in that membrane. They’re not floating around, right. Like your body isn’t a bowl of soup. It’s got structure and it’s these membranes that provide the structure. And if they’re nice and young and fluid and supple, we, we feel good, things are working properly. Things work smoothly. And when they get old and rigid and oxidized, okay, then they get atherosclerosis and things just, you know, everything. Like the doors don’t open, they stick on their jams, the windows are stuck, Nothing, nothing’s working properly. And that’s fossil decomposition.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:10:49]:
And so, and it, and it’s also, it’s also the cell danger response too, right? So when, for a lot of people, when they become chronically ill, it’s because all of their cells have gone into a cell danger response that have altered the structure of the membrane and altered a variety of different things in the cell. Correct, Correct.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:11:11]:
And, well, what happens is you get to this maladaptive state. Basically it’s a protective mechanism, okay? Basically it’s, it’s shutting down your function while you’re in, you know, when you can’t sustain it. So, and then what happens is your body gets used to the maladaptive state and your body has the same type of logic at the cellular level. There’s a logic to it, just like our everyday lives, okay? If you’re a regular working person, right, you get up in the morning, you go to work, you come back and your days are scheduled and you have this certain level, like it’s the old cliche, if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it, right? And it’s the opposite of what you think. You think, oh, people have all this time in the world, I’m going to ask them to do something. Well, no, they’re the ones that can’t get anything done because it takes them, you know, three hours to make lunch. It’s like they have a whole different mindset of things, right? And so when you’re working, you have this active lifestyle, right? And then if you lose your job or you quit your job or you get sick or something, right? And then all of a sudden you don’t have to get up at 8:00 in the morning or 7, 5:00 in the morning, whatever your, your schedule is, and you can sleep in and all of a sudden, but you still have 24 hours a day, right? And you’re still, you’re going to fill it up. And so instead of taking 30 minutes or an hour to have lunch, you say, well, I got lots of time, so I’m going to have two hours for lunch. And, and, and all of a sudden that, you know, if you do that for a short period of time, no big deal, you go back to work, you, you jump back into your regular routine. But then if you’re out of work for like a year or two. All of a sudden it’s like, wow, I, I, you know, you’re just, you’ve, you’ve programmed yourself to a whole different level of activity, right? And it basically becomes like the cell. Like you basically can’t even handle a job anymore because you’ve, you’ve, you’ve adapted to a whole different lifestyle and your cells will do the same thing. So when the cells lose their ability to do their normal job or their functionalities, they adjust, they turn downward, right? Because we’re on fire. Your body’s on, like you’re a hydrocarbon burning entity. Like we generate heat, we take, just like your furnace in the house, like we take hydrocarbons like sugar and fats, proteins, and we burn them into carbon dioxide and water. And the energy that gets created, we store. But if you’re not using that energy like it’s not going to burn it for no reason. So everything kind of slows down. And that’s kind of an aging process happens. And people think, well, I’m just older, I’m moving slower, all this kind of stuff. But your body dampens down. So some of these aging clocks, you know, they’re kind of putting the cart in front of the horse, so to speak, is that they’re actually adjusting to your reduced functionality. And as you increase your functionality, these aging clocks go backwards because your genes start opening up and they say, well, I gotta start doing more. And there’s, there’s a, there’s an adaptation process. But yeah, absolutely, it’s these membranes and phospholipids are heavily involved in that. The other thing that people forget about, and it’s, it’s obvious, it’s, it’s something that we just, it’s obvious in retrospect is that you have these 30 trillion cells and all these membranes, but that’s actually a huge storage reservoir of molecules. So your DHA, when people talk about your omega 3 fatty acids, those aren’t floating around in your body, they’re in the membrane. And your body releases these molecules when they’re under stress. So when you’re inflamed and so these anti inflammatory aspects of some of the things that people realize, that anti inflammatory component is actually stored in the membranes. So anyway, so plasma algen are part of the membrane and they do, they’re kind of membrane modifiers. So if you have high levels of plasma algens, you typically have fluid membranes, which means things work properly and when you get deficient, they become stiff and that’s in the. The main component of like your endothelial function and so on and so forth. And then there’s a second class of plasmaogens which are. Those are the Omega 3 plasmas create fluidity, cognitive enhancement. Your neuromuscular junctions for all your synapses involve those. And then we have a protective version, which is the Omega 9, which is actually in breast milk for the myelin. And it, it creates that very tight, impervious plastic coating on our neurons. And so people with multiple sclerosis, for example, they’ll have depleted levels of plasmaogens in those mem. In. In those type of membranes. So that’s what plasmaogens are. And the weird thing about them is that you can’t get them dietarily. Like really the only real dietary sources of them are either human breast milk and there’s some in shark liver oil, but then you have squalene and a bunch of other things that are in the shark liver oil that cause issues. And so back in the early 2000s when we were researching these things, so I found these plasmaogens, I realized this was 2006 and at that time nobody had ever synthesized an actual plasma precursor that worked. We had these old molecules like chymol alcohol and battle alcohol, but they didn’t really work. They tried them, but they wouldn’t get absorbed in the human body properly. They wouldn’t get converted. And so I was the first to really design and manu. You know, synthesize these plasma precursors called alkyl acyl glycerols. And we can selectively enhance or restore plasmaogens any type we want. We can restore the. The DHA plasmas which are part of the. The omega, the protome neuro, or we can, we can restore the Omega 9 ones which we use proto glia. And so that. Which was sh. Shocking to me like 2006, like this was like 50 some years after of a research of this stuff. And no one had. And I’m going, you know, like, I’m not the dumbest guy in the block, but I’m not like, I’m not the only medicinal chemist in the world thinking like, seriously, it wasn’t. It’s like just no one cared. No one thought. Because first of all, because this plasmaogen story was either in these rare disease in children which is extremely small, like it’s one in a hundred thousand. Okay, so it’s not a big population, so not a huge amount of work being done in that area, or it’s later in life and the Dementia, Parkinson’s, you know, heart disease, issues that happen later. But by then, we really weren’t looking at this. So this. And so there was just this. No one really paid attention. And they’re kind of hard to measure because they, they are. They really. They blow up. And so there’s no dietary source. And you think, wow, if there’s 50% in your heart and there’s a whole bunch in your brain, you know, if I’m eating animal products, I’m eating a nice juicy steak, I gotta be getting plasmas. Like, why aren’t I. Why can’t I eat more? And the weird thing about these molecules is that their special power is a bond called a vinyl ether bond. Okay. It’s like a fuse, basically. It looks. It actually even looks like a electrical fuse, like with a little branch point in there. And your body uses as a major antioxidant, it neutralizes. It’s a major neutralizer of your peroxides. Like, people think about glutathione peroxidase, like glutathione levels, or they think about catalase or other types of enzymes that we use for oxidative stress. But fundamentally, actually, plasma allergins are your main oxidative stress. And they actually get blown up in the process. And so they. They’re actually like a fire blanket. Like, they. They basically kind of smother the fire, but they get used up in the process. And so your body has to remake them.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:18:55]:
Right?

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:18:56]:
Problem is that when you digest plasma allergens, the acid in your stomach destroys them. So if you eat it, if you eat an intact plasmaogen, it doesn’t help your body. You can’t. Doesn’t. It gets digested. So you need what’s called a plasmaogen precursor, which is what’s in breast milk and what’s in shark liver oil and what’s in, you know, proton neuro and protein glia. So that’s the kind of the story about plasmalogens. And then. So the question is, once we had these things, we said, okay, well, what can we do with them? You know, what happens if we put them into people or into animals? Right? And it got pretty exciting because when we gave that, you know, we have animal studies where we can induce multiple sclerosis, for example, right? We can actually give animals toxins, a toxin called Cooper Zone, for example, and it’ll very accurately reproducibly create the same type of demyelination that we see in multiple sclerosis. Highly reproducible. It’s been studied for 50 years. And the we, if we feed animals plasma precursors in advance, they get no demyelination. It completely prevents Cooper Zone even more importantly, even while they’re still on the Cooper Zone. And this is really important for people to talk about mold and they’re talking about, you know, lime and Covid and so you have some active inflammatory response in your body or, or other types of toxicities that you might be dealing with. And we talk about lot with detoxing, but this study showed us very clearly that not only could you prevent it. While the animals were taking the neurotoxin, the animals treated with the plasma precursors actually grew more myelin in the presence of the toxin. And this really gets our mind thinking about this restorative health technology and the really the power of the human body and the human biochemistry actually. So we, and this concept of why are we always focusing on the disease? Why don’t we focus on fixing. If we give the body the materials that it needs to fix a problem, it has incredible regenerative capabilities. And so the Cooper’s own study showed us and we did this, we also did it where we treated the animals for five weeks, created demyelination and then we gave the plasmaogens. At week five and six and seven, they still took the Cooper Zone and they recovered even while they got declined and came back. So it’s very powerful in that demyelination. And then we studied diseases like Parkinson’s. So there’s another animal model called mptp which is an interesting story for people from California. A bunch of kids were trying to make designer heroines back in, I think in the 80s and they weren’t so good at their chemistry. So they created a toxic byproduct called this MPTP and they gave themselves Parkinson’s. So we had this. A group of kids in their 20s went into emergency rooms with full blown Parkinsonian symptoms and was driving. No one knew what’s going on. Like what’s going on with these people? Like why are we seeing full blown Parkinsonian symptoms? And this is what happens in life. So so much of our medicine is serendipitous, right? We see something and, and then some guy or woman digs into the story and, and traces, traces it back like a good old detective story. And so anyway, they did this whole tracing them back to figure out what was going on with these guys and they found this mptp. And so ever since then it’s been one of the main models that we use to study Parkinson’s. So anyway, so we, we did this mp. We did a bunch of studies on MPTP in animals and in monkeys. And again, we could complete, completely prevent Parkinson’s. Wow. There was no, no breakdown of the dopamine system, no breakdown of substantia nigra. A complete restoration prevention of Parkinson’s. And so we know biochemically in these kind of studies it really works in animals and then we find them into humans. So back then I was trying to develop drugs. So I was developing, you know, drug versions of the plasma allergen precursors. And back in 2016 or 17, I kind of had a wake up call and so woke up and say, and you know, so I developed these into natural supplements. So they’re, they’re dietary supplements. They’re. And so they’re not limited to any one issue. And the key point was that we’re really restoring health, right? We’re, we’re, we’re supporting the healthy system of the body, we’re supporting the structure and function. We’re not treating disease and we’re not really, you know, technically you’re preventing it, but that’s health is prevention. Right? So, so it’s not really like a, like a targeted prevention other than a generalized prevention. And so it’s available in that process. And so we did a study looking just to verify that the pharmacokinetics in humans were the same as in animals. And it is. And we were very surprised. We did a quick study with Dr. Jordan in Santa Monica. Only 22 people and with, they had mild to moderate dementia, which is a population we chose because that population typically has low plasma allergens. So we wanted, you know, we didn’t, we want to test plasma allergen restoration. We wanted to pick a population that had a likelihood of plas, low plasma allergen levels. And yeah, and so we were able to restore them in a dose dependent manner. And it was crazy because so many of them got improved mobility like they, their sarcopenic measures, so their sit stand rates improved. And 75% of the, this is only a small little four, four month study. 75% of the people with, with mild to moderate clinical dementia, ratings of ones and twos improved entire score in just four months. And so it’s really quite powerful stuff. And, and it teaches us that we can. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s like a Trojan horse in a sense. It’s saying now that I got your attention with plasmas, like can we fix a few other biochemical systems while we’re at it because you know, the human body is not all plasma allergens. Right. And it’s, it’s an exciting story and it’s a critical unknown molecule that really carries a lot of weight for sure. But it’s not the only thing that you need to fix. You know, you can’t live on plasmaogens alone. Like so you still need to have other good nutrition. And then we deal with, you know, mitochondrial function and your methyltransferase system and your, your other phospholipids like phospho, choline and. And so once we get people’s attention and we say, okay, this is, you can actually restore health. You can actually restore structure and function. And then I myself like I’m 56 now, I started doing this a few years ago and did, did serial MRIs of my brain and unbeknownst to me, like I had an undiagnosed concussion from when I was like five, six years old. I, I was skateboarding in my basement, fell off the skateboard, stupid stuff as a kid and then I fell in the back of my head and I didn’t, you know, and like every parent that they, whatever, bounce their, you know, your kids are made of rubber. Right. And so anyway, so. But I talked to my dad afterwards. Oh yeah, you were in the hospital for like a week for, you know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:26:05]:
Wow.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:26:05]:
Yeah, wow, exactly. Well, like I know that. So I had brain swelling, encephalitis and it was, it was a big deal. Right. So it wasn’t a trivial little bump on the head. Wow. So I’m, I’m here, you know, in my early 50s, thinking everything’s fine, I’m functioning, you know, normally where I thought it was and did they bring in a brain mri? And I started doing the plasmaogen and other nutritional support and lo and behold, there was this, you know, pretty bad inflammation in my brain. And this is post concussive people. This is really a big deal. We have a lot more post concussive syndromes that we think about undiagnosed and we’re anyway so doing plasma restoration on myself, I was able to reverse about 20 years of brain aging. So we can actually show, we can regrow the brain. So we’re now amazing the brain will do these things. So that’s why the plasma story, you know, it’s deficiency is, it’s, you know, they’re linked to cancer physiology. They’re linked to obviously the neurological side of, you know, als, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, dementia, you know, those type of age related issues and So I published, did a lot of work with epidemiology. It’s a big deal. It’s, it’s a, it’s roughly a 30 year difference in lifespan based upon your plasma levels. It’s not a small number. No, that’s, that’s, it’s really. Actually.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:27:28]:
So I think one of the things I want to highlight is, you know, people hear about the APOE4 gene and the associations with Alzheimer’s, dementia, um, especially when they start to get into functional medicine. They might have a family member who has an APOE4 gene and they’re really, really worried about this. And I love the, the, the figure in the book about the. I don’t know if you can see this. There it is. You can see my, My poor book is really. Because I show everyone this. Can you explain this to the, Explain what’s happening with this chart?

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:28:13]:
So this is the probability of dementia. So the APOE 4 genotype is clearly a risk factor for Alzheimer’s and dementia. It’s been one of the most robust statistical associations that we have. Probably it is the benchmark upon which all genetic factors are compared to all the research studies and all the conferences I’ll go to and they’re looking for another snip or something that. Well, it’s not Apoe 4, but it has this. Right. And so it’s kind of like they’re always comparing it for. So by the way, my dad and I haven’t even checked myself, my dad’s an E3 E4 carrier. He’s 87 years old. He’s. He had a cancer episode. We’re completely fighting that. And so, and he’s fully cognitively functioning, fully functioning. Works and drives and has his cows. And so he’s 87 with an E4 carrier. So just so you know, this is completely preventable. Like it’s, it’s, you can, you can deal with that. And I do. This is personal in my own personal life and we talk about cancer as well. But so the E4 is. So you have these three alleles, the E2, E2, E3 and E4. And what’s unique about this? And first of all, they’re all part of the apolipoprotein E family. So apolipoproteins are what the body uses to transport cholesterol and phospholipids across, across the whole body. And most people are familiar with their HDL and LDL levels, for example. Right. So the LDL in your regular circulatory system is called apolipoprotein B. And then your, and that is a molecule that your body uses to transport cholesterol into cells. So and then you have this other molecule called HDL. So high density lipoprotein, and that’s apolipoprotein A1 and that is your reverse cholesterol transport. So that is the molecule that takes cholesterol away. So you have these two in the, in your peripheral system, you have this very large interstate highway system of cholesterol transport. And so it uses one type of protein, apob, to deliver cholesterol and uses another protein to remove cholesterol. So that’s how the temperature gauge works. And because cholesterol is a critical molecule, it’s probably, you know, at talk about plasmaogens and cholesterol, those are probably two of the most important molecules for human life and functionality that we have. Cholesterol is the core for all of your steroid hormones. For example, your estrogen, your test, they all come from cholesterol, okay? And so cholesterol deficiencies are bad, bad news. And that’s what I do. So you want your cholesterol, total cholesterol should always be over 200, ideally in that 240 range. And then your HDL should be in that 60 plus range, you know, ideally. And LDL, don’t worry about it, should be at least 120. I know that’s against every cardiologist online, but that is the reality, that is the epidemiological reality. Hundreds of thousands, millions and millions of patients, studies have shown that the optimal level cholesterol for human health, longevity is around 230 to 240. Okay, that’s just a fact. Anyways, the point of the matter is cholesterol is so important to the human body and it’s like titanium. Like once you make it takes like 30, 40 steps to make a cholesterol molecule. And once you make it, it’s virtually indestructible. So when people talk about oxidized cholesterol, first of all that doesn’t happen. They’re not talking about cholesterol. What they’re actually talking about is oxidized phospholipids in your membranes, okay? And that typically it’s, you know, LP that people are worried about. One of the reasons why, because that’s, that’s one of the lipoproteins that are selectively oxidized. I know I’m going on a tangent, but I’ll get to that point. So the brain, of course, so you have this other, you have this Third, apo lipoprotein, called apo lipoprotein E and it’s ambidextrous, okay? It, it actually has the same level of function as LDL and same level of function as hdl. So it can both enter the cells and feed cells and it can also remove cholesterol. So if people have a genetic deficiency, for example, for ldl, like there’s certain people that are born with no apolipoprotein B or dysfunctional, so they have no ldl, which would be a big, very bad thing in those individuals, your APOE levels will go way up, okay? So your body will adapt to it and APOE will take over that, that job in your periphery. The brain of the humans is very unique because we have virtually no apo lipo B and no Apolipo A1. So there’s no HDL and no LDL. Classic merge in the brain. The brain has almost exclusively just apolipoprotein E. So it uses it because the brain is like Chinatown. It’s a whole bunch of little streets, okay? It’s not a bunch of freeways, okay? And so everything is handling fairly locally. So, so whereas in the, in the periphery, all your cells make cholesterol, but the most of it’s made from your liver and it’s distributed, so it distributes this whole network in the brain. Your cholesterol is made in all your cells, but mostly your astrocytes, but those are just local, it’s all local. And so the brain uses APOE to do both things, both deliver cholesterol to your cells and remove cholesterol from your cells. And so when we get to the association of these three interesting alleles based upon their different disulfide, linkages, the issue is, has nothing to do with the feeding side. So the LDL portion of the Apoe 4 carriers is all equal to everyone else. It has to do with the reverse cholesterol transport part, okay, the ability for cells to remove cholesterol and share cholesterol. So APOE 4 carriers are basically cholesterol savers. They basically, their cells kind of save extra cholesterol and that’s not a problem as you’re younger. And sometimes it’s actually protective against parasites and bacterial infections. It provides a bit more of a, of a, of a strong membrane, if you will. And the, but cholesterol apolipoprotein E4 or E and the DHA plasmalogens are basically two partners in a three legged race, okay? They’re both involved in this reverse cholesterol transport. And what Happens as we get older. When you start losing plasmas in the brain, especially the, the Omega 3 versions, then the plasmas are no longer carrying their job on the reverse cholesterol transport site. And so cholesterol is not being removed out of cells normally. And it kind of builds up and it build, it builds up in the membranes and that creates stiffness in the membranes, but it also changes the proteins in the membranes. And so this whole amyloid hypothesis, so the elevated of you know, amyloid beta protein like 142 is, is a classic peptide that’s associated with the amyloid plaques in the brain. So people that have an E4 have a higher likelihood of having amyloid plaques in the brain because of this situation. But APOE 4 carriers who have high levels of plasmas don’t have any elevation of the amyloid plaques. And so plasmalogians can dose dependently reduce plaques in our cell culture studies and, and epidemiologically in human brains, if we look at postmortem brain tissue, if you have high levels of plasmalogens and an E4 genotype, you have normal amyloid levels. So everything’s. So that’s what happens. So what happens over time? So that graph shows those three graphs. It basically shows that as you get higher levels of blood plasmalogens. Okay. And the high level is here on your, your left. Basically the difference between the genotypes disappears. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:36:15]:
A, so that’s the APOE four is the red line, APOE three threes are the orange and the twos are protected and so they have the least amount. But the apo. If everybody has high plasma levels, the risk of dementia gets negligible for everyone.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:36:36]:
Right. And basically counter. And we publish a big paper in Brain Science on this epidemiologically as well on 1,200 and some people where we looked at the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in individuals based upon their blood levels of plasmalogens and their APOE genotype. And it was very clear that people that had high plasmogens in their blood and were E4 carriers had no increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. And so that was, you know, and so, and that was just random epidemiological. We’re not even pushing the buttons now where we, now we can, we can restore plasmaogens and make sure everybody has healthy levels regardless of, you know, your diet and lifestyle. And what’s interesting about plasmaogens is they all the things that we tell people to do, eat properly, exercise, resistance training, maintaining muscle mass, those are the things that naturally elevate your plasma levels, okay? And those are the things that we naturally lose as we get older. So this loss of skeletal muscle mass is linked to increased rates of our type 2 diabetes, sarcopenia, going older. And that messes up a whole bunch of things, including your plasmaogen levels. So these little things that we talk about is, you know, proper nutrition, maintaining skeletal muscle mass as we get older, which only happens if you do, you know, moderate resistance training. These things, they, they’re important, they mean something. There’s, there’s a reason why they’re important. And we talk about hormone replacement or we talk about maintaining your ability to maintain muscle mass. You know, the type of protein that you take when you get older is very important. Like, I recommend everyone, you know, whey protein with, with added leucine. So leucine enriched whey protein, your niacin levels, good old fashioned creatine. You know, everyone should be on, Certainly everyone over 40, 50 should be on creatine every single day. It also lowers your homocysteine levels. So that’s what I talk about when we talk about nutrition. Plasmas are basically just advanced nutrition. That’s really all they are. And, and, but they’re powerful. And like anything else in this world, you know, if you’re B12 deficient and you get a B12 shot, you think you’ve been saved from hell. You know, so if you hit the right button, no matter what that button is, you know, your health can get dramatically restored. And that’s just so weird about this, Kelly, because we see this over and over again, right? And we talk with your clients and your patients and, and you do, you know, we do lab testing, we find, try to find certain things to, that could be the cause of situations. And that’s very important because when you hit the right button, you know, people’s lives change, right? And, but then we, we can, but there’s a, there’s a big long list of things that we know we should be doing anyways. Like, we don’t need a lot. I, I don’t need a blood test to make sure you, you know, get some decent B12 and an acetylcysteine and car. Like I don’t need a blood test to tell you that. Like, that’s, that’s just, it’s like saying, you know, drink water. Like, yeah, you should have some of that stuff in your. I don’t need to. So sometimes it’s nice to have a blood test to like, we do this protome scan testing. It’s more of a. Of a feel good report card for people. Because it was like, you can start where you are and say, you do your job, you get the proper nutrition, get your plasmas and other nutrition, and you’ll see your cx, your protein levels come down, you see homocysteine come down, you see your. And so it basically shows, yes, you’re on the right track. Good job. Okay, You’re. It’s not just a placebo here. We’re not giving you sugar water. It’s. It’s something to actually, you’re doing something inside, right? If you’re feeling better and you’re seeing the results, then it provides more incentive to keep going. Because that’s the other problem. Like, there’s. There’s so much information out there, right? And people jump from one new fad to another new fad, and they don’t know if they should stick to this longer. When should I switch from one strategy to another strategy? And I think our job as scientists and as advanced clinicians is to provide that objective feedback for individuals. And this is where the MRI comes in so people can actually understand that they have control of this biochemist like EPOE4 status. Like, it’s not like you’re not some passive participant. Like, it’s not like the world. You just take what the world gives you. You actually have control. You can jump in and you can take control of biochemistry. And so that’s what we kind of basically do is, is, you know, biochemical engineering. It’s like, you know, it’s like recipes. It’s like being a farmer. You know, you need nitrogen and phosphorus.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:41:15]:
And water and get the right sunshine, need all that. So before we jump into the functional MRIs, I’d love to talk a little bit more about the prodrome scan and just kind of share a story, so. And enable you to highlight this idea that plasmalogens are the body’s preferred antioxidant. Because that’s essentially what happened with me. Now, I didn’t have a prodrome scan before I got Covid, but after I got Covid, I did a prodrome scan because I was having some, you know, just a little, little bit of not quite brain fog, but I just didn’t feel as sharp. I wasn’t on my game, and obviously I need to be on my game on a regular basis because I’m trying to help people solve their medical mysteries and everything. So it just, it wasn’t working. I did the prodrome scan and holy crap. My plasmalogen levels, despite the fact that I had been taking phosphatidylcholine forever. My plasmalogy levels were actually pretty low, like under 50%, some of them even lower. Some of them were, you know, in the 20s. And it was affirming to recognize that, yes, I’m not crazy, I’m actually having some deficiency states. And then being able to take the plasmalogen precursors in the form of prodrome neuro just was a game changer for my brain health and really made me a true believer because. Because it made such a difference for me. So maybe talk a little bit more about the testing and what, what it shows and then, yeah, tie in that antioxidant piece because, you know, we have so many of our patients who are exposed to environmental chemicals, the wildfires, you know, that are happening in la, mold, all these chronic infections, those things trigger oxidative stress in patients. And it’s not just about taking glutathione or hydrogen water or whatever to, or vitamin C to boost up your antioxidants. We have to pay attention to the plasmalogens as well.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:43:32]:
Yeah. And the COVID is a really good example, okay. Because one of the, it’s a very toxic to the heart, okay. The myocarditis aspects of, you know, your heart health and your brain health and it passes through like the microglia inflammatory cascade that occurs with COVID is highly documented and reproducible. But the issue, the big issue with COVID really is on the heart. And we have all these myocarditis issues. And as I mentioned earlier, over 50% of the fossil that puts in your heart are these plasmaogens. And so these plasmaogens act as specifically in a myocarditis situation is that you can think of. And it’s bad story for everyone fighting fires in la, but you can think of plasmas like a reservoir, okay. It’s like a water reservoir. And the water reservoir is your membranes and say for your heart. And your heart, of course is a very dynamic organ. It’s pumping 60, 70 times a minute for the, your whole life. And it doesn’t, it’s not like your skeletal muscle is store a lot of extra energy. So your, your heart is really on demand all the time. And so when it has inflammation, it affects it directly. And so what happens then is in the membranes, these plasmaogens in the membranes, when the body experiences inflammation like a myocarditis and Covid comes in and it knocks down complex one of the mitochondrial transport chain. So very clear mechanistic information of how the protein does that and so when the cells experience this inflammation event, what they do is they up regulate, they basically upregulate certain enzymes like phospholipase A1, phospholipase A2. And what those do is they dump these phosphates out of your membrane into the cell and it uses it to neutralize the peroxide and the oxidative stress markers. And the theory is, okay, well you’re only going to have a little fire here and there, right? So the reservoir, you might take down 5, 10% of it or whatever. And then the inflammation goes away and slowly you rebuild your membrane banks. And so when people have these long Covid situations, what’s happening is when you get a chronic inflammatory event like Covid and it sticks around. And whatever’s been going around this fall, this winter has been just horrible. Like this whatever strain has been, has just been knocking people way down. And so anyways, the point is, what happens then is if you lose too much of that reservoir and say the reservoir is being fed by some stream from the mountains, there’s a, there’s just a limit to how much you can refill the reservoir, the rate at which the reservoir can be refilled. And if that fire doesn’t get put out right away, okay, if it goes on too long, no person can maintain the plasmaogen biosynthesis capacity rates to continue to keep up fire building. And this is where you couple the cell danger response. So all at some point the membranes and when it loses the plasma, the memories actually shrink because like it’s, it’s like a, they shrink from a grape into a raisin essentially because it’s losing its content. And when it shrinks like that, it, it loses a lot of its functionality. So it shuts down and it does that to protect itself, so it doesn’t actually die. And this is where we talk a lot about these senescent cells, for example, right? Big, big topic of conversation because these senescent cells kind of shrink down to this dormancy state that are sub functional. So back to this whole Covid and plasmalogen anti inflammatory concept. That’s really what it comes down to. And so these, and a lot of people suffer from long Covid. And there’s, there’s, you know, published publications, peer reviewed publications showing that Covid specifically depletes these plasma levels. So we do a lot of work. You know, the Omega 9 is the critical one for the heart itself. They both share each other. And then the brain fog really comes with the Omega 3s. But yeah, I Can’t tell you how many people, how many doctors, patients and kids with COVID or even, you know, you know, even strep and pandas type of things where you get these chronic inflammatory syndromes where the, the body just gets underwater and it just can’t catch up. And the problem with the plasma allergens, there’s nothing. There’s other. There’s no real dietary source of them, right? So you’re basically stuck. And, and obviously, if we can get rid of the inflammation, right, get rid of the lung, get rid of the, the mold, these things, those things relieve the pressure on the system, but they don’t actually feed directly the system. So you want to do both, right? You want to minimize the load on your system, but you have to find a way to plug in the positives as well. And so we have to restore the cells and the body’s capability of restoring itself. And this is where this, this targeted nutrition and the protome scan looks. You know, obviously plasmaogen is their portion of it, but we look at the, like, I don’t know, tens of thousands of patients that have studied and all these risk factors for cancer and for different diseases. There’s certain biochemical systems that are just bad pennies. They keep, they pop up all the time, right? High homocysteine or low homocysteine, or you have C reactive protein, the basic cholesterol levels, triglycerides, your creatine.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:50]:
Can you speak to the, the basic cholesterol and just how. Because I remember hearing you say one time that if you have low HDL and high triglycerides, that’s like a poor man’s prodrome scan, Right?

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:49:02]:
Exactly. Yeah. So again, those things that are good for you, right? So when you say, you know, before you had protrome scan and plasmas, whatever it is, and say if someone has high triglycerides and low hdl, what would you do for them, right? Exercise, you know, resistance training. Niacin is a very. Yeah, exactly. So because it’s peroxisomal mediated, so, yes, these are still very, very powerful biomarkers. So your triglycerides, so your poor man. Plasmagen test, if you will, is triglycerides should between 60 and 90. And so triglycerides are what your body, the body runs on your fat, okay? Like if you take a look at, you got this distribution of subcutaneous fat around your body. And the only reason we eat it all is to store fat. Okay? That’s the only point because your body runs on fat, in case, basically the whole feeding process is to store, is like filling up your gas tank, which is all your subcutaneous fat. And so after you finish eating at a certain, certain period of time, your body switches from this fed state to the fasting state. And when you are in the fasting state, your, all your adipose cells are releasing free fatty acids into your blood supply, which is the primary energy source, especially of your muscles in your heart, for example. And those cell, those fatty acids enter your cells now and your body uses it to burn energy. And if your cells can’t are underwater or they, or they’re weak and they’re not performing properly, these fatty acids go into the cells and the cell says, way too much, I can’t handle this stuff. And so what they do is they repackage it on triglycerides and send it back to your fat cells. So if you’re sitting there with triglycerides at 120, 130, okay, you’re recycling fat, okay? And if you want to lose weight or get healthy, okay, you’re recycling fat. You got to get your triglycerides into that 60 to 90 range. And when that happens, you’re in the fasting state, which is the proxosomal function is active. This is also related into cancer, a big deal. And then when your peroxis almost active and your cell, your, all your cells are making enough of their own cholesterol, they start sharing their cholesterol and it’s when they export the cholesterol that your H2 levels come up because your body doesn’t leave. And there’s nothing floating around your body that doesn’t have a purpose. So the question is, you always have to ask why? Okay, if I have low HDL levels, why, why, why is my body chosen? You know, they’re not, it’s not going to randomly do anything. It’s a reason why it has, like, if you have low HDL levels, it’s because you don’t need your, your body doesn’t need good HDL levels because you’re not making enough cholesterol for the HDL to transport. And if you’re not making enough cholesterol for the HDL to transport, the body’s not going to make HDL just for the hell of it, okay? It’s going to, it’s going to adapt to how much you need. And so when your cells can make enough cholesterol and start exporting cholesterol properly, then your HDL levels come back up because your body builds more HDL to transport the cholesterol demand and the other factor in it is the phosphatidylcholine because this lethase in cholesterol acetyl transferase system puts it on your HDL particles. So yeah, so that’s, so if you have good. So if your peroxis own function is healthy, if you’re work, what’s going to happen is first of all your hormones are going to be healthy because you’re going to be making cholesterol, your HDL levels are going to be healthy, your triglyceride levels are going to be healthy. And those are all very, very simple markers for you. And then that’s kind of that cholesterol. It’s a really, really good general barometer. If you, when you, when you’re cholesterol, if you’re not, you know, taking a statin, if there’s not a reason for you to have low cholesterol, if you’re just a natural normal person and you have cholesterol in 180 or 120 or 1, you know, under 200, that tells you your cellular health is not good and your all cause mortality goes up. Soon as you’re, as soon as your cholesterol gets under 200, all cause mortality goes up and then yeah, cholesterol system.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:00]:
I have a bunch of patients, oftentimes they’re vegans and their cholesterol will be like 110, 120. And I just think, oh my God. So what? I know you’re not a clinician, but in those circumstances they need healthy fats, they need better proxisomal functioning. What else, what else would you suggest that people.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:53:22]:
Yeah. So if you are a vegan for ethical reasons, okay, you have to remember, you know, you are a mammal, you’re not a plant, okay? And so, and we’re, we’re, we are omnivores, okay. We’re not designed like, so our body needs certain things that plants can’t provide. And plants, when you’re eating plant products, especially plant seeds, for example, right. Remember the plant seed is like not a bad, it’s, it’s designed for the future plant, okay? Like when a plant makes a seed, it’s saying how it’s like a, it’s like an egg, it’s like a fetus. It’s, it’s saying, it’s preparing that, that product for a future adult plant. And an adult plant has, plants have cell walls, they don’t have membranes, okay? Animals have membranes. And so the fossil lipid compositions of plants are always dramatically different than what a human is. And so we can convert certain plant products into human, mammalian products, but we can’t convert all of them. So there’s certain rules as it as like, you know, sulfur amino acids are also very deficient in plants. So making sure you’re getting, you know, an acetyl, you know, cysteine and methionine, make sure you get your sulfur amino acids if you’re, if you’re, if, if you are a vegetarian. The other thing that we get from animal products is creatine and carnitine. Carnitine, carnivore. Right. It, it’s designed for that. And so you definitely want to be taking supplemental creatine. Supplemental carnitine. Okay. Certain things that are just not there in plants and you, and you want to get your healthy fats and ideally, if you, you know, if you don’t mind eggs, that’s a great, a lot. Some vegetarians will eat eggs and if you can get them, eat eggs. That’s, that’s a really a, a master food product for them. But that’s a big issue because what happens is they get, what they’re doing to their bodies is that they’re forcing the human body to make everything from scratch. Okay. So, so the human body has ability like we’re, we’re designed not to starve to death, right? So it will make choline, it will make these molecules. But if you, but you’re putting a lot of strain on the human body to make everything from scratch rather than having certain things pre made to them. You’re basically trying to build a house and you’re asking, you’re making the carpenter go out and cut trees down to build the lumber rather than just giving them lumber. So here’s the lumber. Build a house. And so what you’re doing, if you’re vegetarian, you’re basically saying, okay, carpenter, I’m not going to give you pre made two by fours, go in the forest and cut your own trees and you’re just putting a whole bunch of extra work on your system and it becomes harder, harder to do. You’re just making extra barriers to human health and physiology that are basic stuff. And so those are the big issues. So a lot of these plant based proteins don’t have the best amino acid distributions in them. So yeah. So first of all, I just kind of like if it’s a real ethical agent, if people are just doing it for lifestyle, then you know, try to get good animal, you know, even if they’re taking organ, you know, pills, you know, like the other things, it’s hard to keep your iron levels up and you know, B12.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:39]:
And yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of nutrient insufficiencies.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:56:42]:
You have to be really, really up on your game, okay. And there’s a reason why these people look bad, okay? Like, you know, it’s not, it’s a cliche, but you go into a health food store and they, and these. If you’re fanatical on the, the vegetarians, these people don’t look good, okay? They just don’t. And so, and I think that’s proof is in that kind of concept. So you have to look at yourself and feel yourself and, and we all have to do reality checks every now and then.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:57:13]:
So before we jump to questions, I do wanted to touch on the, the conversation of plasmaogens in cancer because I think that that one is also really profound. So we’ve kind of covered it in cardiovascular disease. That makes sense. 50% of plasma allergens are in the myocardium and the heart muscle. And then certainly we talked about the dementia piece. But let’s talk about cancer too, and the plasmaogen story.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:57:45]:
Cancer is always a sensitive topic. So cancer, all cancers have the same physiology. This is where people get caught up in trying to breast cancer and ovarian cancer. And I do lectures on brca, for example, and those type of things. But all you really need to know about cancer is that cancer cells become trained to be reduced mitochondrial function. So you get this extra mitochondrial production of cholesterol, extra mitochondrial production of ATP. And this is where they get their slight immortality. Because remember we cancer cells are probably the healthiest cells, okay? But they’re just not friendly neighbors, okay? They’re parasitic to. So they’re, they’re healthy, but they’re just not a good community member of your cells.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:58:34]:
Healthy in terms that they’ve optimized their functionality so that they can live an extended period of time.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [00:58:40]:
Oh yeah. Like they’re. Yeah, they’re just. And so when we talk about reducing the methylation, like that’s a. These are classic cancer phenotypes. And you become. Cancer cells come almost like stem cell, like in a sense because they have this ability to grow without barriers. So biochemically they’re. But they’re healthy because they can, they can feed off the, the surrounding cells. What happens in all cancer cells and why plasma are deficient in cancer cells is cancer cells become fixed in the fed state. So there’s, there’s two states basically your, your fed state and Private state is. That’s your fed state and your, your fasting state. Fasting state. So when you’re in the fed state, your body has excess energy, more energy than it can deal with. And the mitochondrial function turns into being anabolic versus purely catabolic. And so it’ll send acetyl COA into the, into the cytosol. And you have people have, you know, a AMP kinase, for example. People hear these little switchers or mtor people hear about. But what happens in cancer cell is they get programmed. The mitochondrial function gets suppressed and it works extra mitochondrially. And when it’s in this fed state, proximal function gets turned down. This is also why you see this muscle mass loss in cancer. So a big issue with cancer. We, we don’t talk about the, the other consequences of cancer. How like, you know, people lose their. How. How does this small little cell mass destroy a human being, right? And how does it destroy the mass of their muscles and so on and so forth. So when you’re in this chronic fed state, your proxomes are turned off and so they’re not making plasmas. Cholesterol builds up and the whole cycle of cancer becomes locked in place. And so, and that’s why plasmas are reproducibly low virtually in all cancers. And so when we take. And I have a personal experience this, so my dad talked about with an APO E3.4. He’s 87. But about two years ago, almost a year and a half ago, you know, he had, he’s in Canada, so he had no way of avoiding the COVID shots. And so he had. Otherwise he was basically locked in his house all day long. But he was out walking the fields in his 80s because that’s what he does. And he got some sort of rash, he got some sort of, you know, he felt that he had some irritation. And then they went, checked him out in the hospital and they found that he had this advanced B cell lymphoma about size of a quart. It was this big. Wow. Wrapped around his kidney, ureter and everything. So. And of course, he’s 85 at the time. He’s 85 of the time. So they think, well, you’re an old guy. They’re not going to do anything. They can’t really treat it. They can’t get in surgically because it’s covering, it’s covering his ureter and all this kind of stuff. And so they gave him like two months to live. This is like 18. This, this is back in August, September of last Year.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:42]:
Wow.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:01:43]:
Year before last, actually. And so obviously, so I’ve been preaching about cancer and phenotypes and understanding this. And, and so then this is where reality kind of hits you right between the eyes. And so the question is, what kind of chemo would he go on? And, and so we, we put him on a biochemical, you know, obviously he’s, he’s alive and healthy and functioning. And, and the trick was for him too, to teach him that the cancer, as long as cancer is not growing, it has to shrink. Cancer survives by its growth. And the question is, can you, how do you live healthily with cancer as the cancer shrinks in your body? And can we convert your biochemical phenotype? And so the, the trick with cancer is you need to shift the biochemistry back into the mitochondria. So there’s the, the fasting. Right. You’re dietary. Like, you need to maintain a ketogenic diet. Like not strict, strict keto, because I’m not a big fan of overdoing keto, but fundamentally a ketogenic diet. Mitochondrial support inside the cells, high doses of plasmas to help improve the reverse cholesterol transport system. And then obviously we, you know, did some other work with, you know, ivermectin and rapamycin. So we, we basically, you want to block the fed state, force the cell into a fasting state. And a fasting cell cannot be cancerous. Okay. So if your cells be. And this is where the brine comes in and how that risk factor for people. So basically by doing that basic strategy is we were able to systematically shrink his cancer while he’s living and functioning and being healthy in other aspects of his life. And it’s ongoing right now. So it’s now, it’s, it’s still, he still has it, but it’s now down to a quarter or third of its size. And the cancer agency tracks them and follows them and they’re very interested and excited to see this because that doesn’t happen in this typically fast growing cancer type. Right. Because that’s the problem with the lymphomas. They don’t have any barriers to them, so they’ll grow like crazy. But that’s the point. That’s a real story. And that’s an E4 carrier with cancer, probably a Covid complication.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:04:02]:
Right, Right. And you found this with all different kinds of cancers because the pathophysiology is all the same.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:04:11]:
Correct. And there’s. So different cell types will have different susceptibilities. Right. You basically never get cancer of your muscles, for example, you never get cancer of your heart very rarely. Right. You know, if you do, it’s both usually metastatic. It’s usually not, it’s usually not the site of the initial cancer site. And that’s because those cells are fundamentally run always in the fasting state. Like they’re, they’re never really in the fed state. They, they run fundamentally on fatty acid metabolism. And so you look at the, you know, epithelial cells or you look at the breast and prostate. And so you look at these, when you look at the cancer incidence rate by organ type, right. And you’ll see there’s quite a big difference. Right. So the most prevalent are breast and prostate, followed by colon, lung. These are, these are cell types that are, they have a very, so you can, you can just walk your way down the leveling level of their, their fasting versus fed biochemistry. And then, so you have this, these cells that have a predisposition and then there’s, of course there has to be some triggering event that basically help. That happens in that particular cell type. And then that’s the targeting side. And you know, there’ll be obviously certain genetics that will predispose one group to another. Like you’ll have different types. But the, the predisposition to the cancer is, doesn’t change the actual cancer phenotype itself. Once it happens. It just kind of gives you the directionality as to where is the, where is it, where, where is the most likely site of the cancer. But once that happens, the chemistry of cancer in the cells are fundamentally identical regardless where you are. You know, the genetics will be different. There’ll be different gene transcripts and there’ll be different things. But the basic biochemistry is, is ide, is, is universal across all cancers.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:09]:
So can you say that in a, say that again in a more simple way so that people can really grasp this conver, this concept? Because I think it’s important.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:06:20]:
Yeah. So cancer cells don’t become cancer cells because they want to become cancer cells. Cancer cells become cancer cells because they have no other way of surviving other than becoming cancerous. So that’s the other part. They think again, this concept that this is some sort of infection. Cancer is not an infection. Okay. Cancer is, you know, one drug dealer on your street. Okay. That happens. And then eventually another one pops in, another one pops in. Sooner or later they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re building a 711 down the street to feed them. And so you basically, that’s what cancer. It starts with one and builds up. And so it’s the community around the cancer that keeps it shrunk. The, the. What happens to a cancer cell is that it. Because of mitochondrial dysfunction, it teaches itself to live on glucose, okay, which is. Which is actually a less efficient energy source than fatty acids. And then as it teaches itself to run on glucose versus fatty acids, then it. Then it upregulates the glucose transporters and it starts sucking more glucose from around the cells which it can steal from. And so that’s fundamentally. It’s a metabolic switch that occurs in these cells that if left unabated, they will teach the cell next to it and the cell next to that and the way to. And so it’s really, from a simplistic perspective, it’s a metabolic switch that occurs, that is allowed to continue unabated. And the real trick of cancer is, remember, you got this little cell body, okay? You had a whole body that’s not cancerous. So we focus entirely on the cancer and we don’t focus on how do we strengthen the rest of the body, okay, to self regulate the cancer, okay? It can control. And if you in. The goal is to make the rest of your body inhospitable, okay, Your body should be inhospitable to cancer. And if it has no place to go, okay, it has no. Has only one other place to go, which is down, okay? And there’s a natural turnover rate. And so that’s the. So we get. Sometimes we get obsessed because we get so scared. You know, no one wants to be walking around with a tumor in their body, right? He’s like, get that out of me. Right? Get it out, get it out. Right? And so, but that surgery and that, that chemo and all that stuff has other consequences. So you first have to make sure that the human body is strong and healthy and robust so that it can actually live with the cancer and it can actually contain it so that it can’t get out of its spot. And if you can contain it, it will. If a cancer isn’t growing, it’s dying. By definition, it can’t. It’s not. It’s not a homeostatic cell system. It’s not like a heart or kidney, okay? It doesn’t have a function. Its only function is to grow. And if it can’t grow, by definition, it will shrink. And I think that’s what people, they get. You know, it’s a. I think. So basically, you know, from a biochemistry perspective or from a simplistic perspective, it’s really just a metabolic Switch. And it’s occurring across your entire body. It just happens that that spark landed in that location of your body, right? So the cancer phenotype is your entire body, okay. And it just happens that a spark landed in your kidney or landed in your colon or landed in your breast, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the only place in your body that has this weakened prodrome, if you will. Right? And so when you want to restore it, you need. You need to restore the whole body and then deal. Because there’s. There’s a. And then that’s also why people with cancer, even if they’ve been treated with cancer, their recurrence rates are much higher than someone who never had cancer in the first place. And so our current treatment protocols is you take a ball tire and it gets flat, and you put a patch on it, okay? And you put it back on the road, but it’s still a bald tire, okay? And just waiting for the next hole to happen. And the next hole happens, and you bring it back in the shop and you put another patch on it, and you put it back on the road again. And so. But sooner or later, the tire, you just can’t patch enough holes and you die, basically. And I think the issue is, can you retread the tire? Okay. And so that’s what we’re trying to deal with, retreading the tire, basically, is restoring, destroy. The nice thing about the human body is it’s not a tire, right? It’s actually a living organism. It’s actually like you’re building these cells and membranes every single day of your life. So it’s not, you know, you’re not. You’re not a piece of copper or. Or plastic. You’re. You’re living material. And every single cell your body is living, and it’s building things, and it’s. It’s got the capability to restore its membranes, restore its function. You just need to provide the materials and then also provided the purpose. Like, you know, you can’t take a football player and put them on a couch and expect them to maintain muscle mass like you have to. There has to be a reason. Your body won’t do anything without a reason. And it’s our job to give it a reason, you know, which means you need to have a reason to get up in life. You need to have a purpose in your life. You need to have, you know, if you don’t have one, make one up, you know, and so, because otherwise you’re not. No amount of medicine is going to help Someone who doesn’t have a desire to. To be more so.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:55]:
So I think I. I might have a tweak on your analogy. So rather than the cancer cell being a drug dealer, maybe it’s a homeless kid, Right? It’s an orphan. It’s a homeless kid. And what does it do? It steals to say, stay alive. And it recruits other homeless kids. It’s kind of like, you know, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. And we can have a lot more compassion for a homeless kid than a drug dealer. And wouldn’t we teach that? Teach or wouldn’t we treat that cancer cell with a lot more love and respect if that’s what it really needs? So food for thought. Let’s.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:12:45]:
You’re okay with that one? Just when you talk about. We don’t. We don’t really. We typically don’t raid kids. We raid. But anyways, yeah, I’m okay with that. It’s a very compassionate strategy. And. And it’s the same. It’s the same analogy. Absolutely. You basically, you know, birds of a feather flock together, so they. They. And. And sooner or later, they create a critical mass. Right. Now, now you have a big problem on your hands. Right?

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:09]:
Right. Well, yes. So maybe the kids. I don’t know. I mean, I think it depends on how we want to reframe our understanding of cancer physiology and like the war on cancer. And maybe it’s not about a war. Right. That’s the whole idea. It’s not really a war.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:13:26]:
I agree with you. 100. Also, you can convert cancer cells back. And so this is the other aspect of it. And so, no, that’s a really good. Remember, the cancer cells are you. Right. They’re not some foreign entity in your body. They are still you in your body.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:41]:
So, yes. Okay, so I have just a couple questions, and then we’re going to wrap this up. The first question, I have MTHFR and was recommended to do B12 hydroxycobalamin shots. When I started doing one or two MLS, I’m crashing with levels above 2000. What am I? What am I to do with the B12 mystery? That’s one question. And then she goes on to say, underwent colonoscopy with EGD to rule out pernicious anemia. As far as I know, I don’t have it. But I got Covid in August 23rd, my neurologist has sent me to a long Covid clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:14:24]:
So on the mthfr, mutation and insufficiencies. So, first of all, you’re alive. And not dead. So clearly your body has sufficient methyl transferase capacity to sustain your life. And so what happens when we look measuring blood tests? Often people who have a mutation will actually have low homocysteine levels. So this is where homocysteine becomes important. People are always worried about high homocysteine levels. But if you have low homocysteine levels it means that your body actually can’t perform methyltransfers effectively. So anyone who’s dealing with any kind of methyltransferase defect, the absolute core component of your diet has to be creatine, 4 to 5 grams of creatine per day and phosphatidylcholine. If you take create. So the two main drags on the human body for methyltransferase load is making creatine and making phosphatylcholine. So creatine is made in two parts. The first half is made in your kidneys molecule called gaa. And that molecule goes into your liver and it gets methylated to become creatine. And so it creates. So a huge percentage of the homocysteine in the body is created from manufacturing of creatine. And the other part is from phosphat. Choline gets made from phosphate ethanolamine through and methyl transfer system. So if you take those. So if you have anyone out there that you know is doing all the right things, they’re taking their B12, you know. Also you can look at trimethylglycine, you know your methylfolate and your homocysteine levels keep holding up there. If you give them creatine and phosphylcholine typically they’ll drop right down because what you’re doing then is you’re reducing the load. So say you have a methyl transferase defect that relative to a normal person that your methyltransfer capacity, say 75% of normal. Well, if you provide your body with 50% of the methyl load then you’re going to be at, you’re going to have three times. If you provide your body with the methyl transfers capacity with methyl, with creatine and phosphor choline you’ve actually reduced the methyltransferase low down to 25%. So your 75 is still three times what you need. And so, so sometimes we forget about a lot of this homocysteine. Sorry if that alarm is. There it goes. That’s, that’s one of the big recipes for that. And so you can reduce your methyl, your b. You know, get down to a B12 that you’re comfortable with the methyl B12, methylfolate, trimethylglycine are, are, are, you know, you can they interact with each other. But fundamentally if you, if you lower the load on your body, you’re virtually everybody has enough methyl transfer capacity.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:17:02]:
Great. Following on that, if homocysteine levels are extremely high, are the membranes of the body affected any degree and are there other things that are impacted away where plasmalogens would play a role here?

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:17:17]:
Yeah. So homocysteine. High homocysteine is one of the most robust biomarkers of dementia of cardiovascular disease. It’s usually correlated with C reactive protein. So people with high homocysteine will often have high C reactive protein, which is an indication of oxidative stress. And so when you have high homocysteine, it means that your body is inflamed, that it is making it, it, there’s a bunch of membrane breakdown and that it is making a bunch of membrane fossil lipids because that creates a methyltransferase demand. So that’s why it’s a biomarker itself. And so yes, and so the biggest problem with homocysteine when it gets elevated is homocysteine itself is not really relevant. It’s actually a biomarker of its precursor, which is called S adenosal homocysteine sah. And that’s a molecule that shuts down your methyltransfer system because otherwise your body would get depleted of methionine, for example. So what’s the problem with high homocysteine is not that, well, part of it. It indicates oxidative stress. The biggest issue is that when you have high homocysteine levels, all of your meth, your, your, your essential methotransferry systems are all shut down. Your body shuts them all down. It’s like a high homocysteine, like, it’s like a red engine light. It basically shuts your engine off, the methyl transferase engine off. And so that’s why it’s a dangerous thing. So yes, your membranes, your membrane manufacturing of choline and all these things become impaired as well as a bunch of your neurotransmitters. You know, this is a big problem with people with Parkinson’s when they take L dopa, for example. L dopa will highly reproducibly elevate your, your homocysteine levels. So you really want to manage that while you’re at it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:18:56]:
Great. How much plasmalogens would be too much and how does one know how much to consume based on whether they’re in a healthy state or a very imbalanced state. Yeah.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:19:11]:
So again, yeah, I get that question, and unfortunately, the answer is not really a polite one. It’s really about cost because it takes a lot to manufacture things, and they’re not the cheapest things in the world. And so really, like the upper limit, I have kids with leukodystropies that take 10 to 20 milliliters a day. Okay. Of plasma. So these are little kids that were restoring their. Their white matter tracks and leukodystrophy. And so that’s like 20 capsules. So the. The upper limit, obviously you take too much of anything, but really, I take about 10ml of Neuro and 10ml of Glia per day. Our ALS patients and other patients, we up to a little bit more than that on a regular person over time. It’s just. It’s just about the, The. The elevation that. The rate of elevation. But I typically tell people the kind of the happy place is really that 4 to 5 mils per day. So like, a bottle of each a week is really the happy place. If you can afford it. Okay. Unfortunately. And then the other thing a lot of patients, a lot of clients will do, if you’re feeling sick or you feel like you’re going down with something, you can load up on the glia in advance. Like, glia is really powerful immune modulator. So if you feel like you’re coming down with a flu or something, you can take higher doses for a short period of time to get you through that. But really the optimal dose we’re just finding over time isn’t that 4 to 5 mils per day. That’s what’s been restoring my brain structure and function long term. And it’s really food. Food in that regard. And hopefully as we get more manufacturing up, these prices will come down. We’re doing community health medicine and stuff like that, but that’s really the, the real only barrier to keeping these things is the cost, unfortunately.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:00]:
So, yeah, in terms of capsules, I do like four capsules of the prodrome neuro a day, and I should probably take more glia than I do.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:21:11]:
Yeah. And you’ll know yourself. Like, so Glee is really powerful for, for women who are getting pregnant or lactating. Like, it really improves breast milk production. It improves the sleep of the. Of. Of the child. They’re really powerful. So. But people notice, like in our staff, for example, a lot of them find that six really helpful. And some of the. In the younger People, not for me, but they go to eight and they can’t get up in the morning. They’re sleeping so hard, hard. And so people find between that 4 and 6 range typically makes them the best. And the neuro, I tell you, the neuro and my little hack in the morning now is, is the neuro with some ketone esters and some hydrogen water. And that is really a wonderful brain hack for all of you hackers out there because it, it prevents any need. If you, if you are a person who really likes their cup of coffee in the morning and can’t survive without it, try that one day. Try hydrogen water and some ketones and some protome neuro and you’re jacked. It’s, it’s a pretty, it, you’re, you’re, you’re wake and up after that it’s kind of fun.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:22:19]:
Yeah, I love it. We are just about at time I think. I know there are a couple questions. One was about COVID but I think we kind of talked about COVID And then one was about the blood test to definitively determine how many mls per day. You know, it’s the Prodrome scan which is available on Dr. Goodenow’s website. So why don’t you give us some information about where people can find you?

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:22:53]:
Yeah, so the supplements and blood testing and the practitioners, they’re all on prodrome.com that’s the commercial site for supplements and blood testing and the different levels of practitioner services. And then all the research and everything that are restorative health centers. Like we have an inpatient facility that people come to for ALS and Ms. All that research facility work is done under drgoodnow.com and so we have those kind of the research side and then the commercial side. And so you can find information in both of those locations.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:23:28]:
And I would say the drgoodenow.com website is just a wealth of information. You’ve got courses there and all sorts of brilliant information there. So if people are interested in learning more, educating themselves, that’s a great place to go. And I think uh, somebody asked about how much phosphatidylcholine daily. Uh, you want to just give two seconds.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:23:54]:
Yeah. Well, we use the egg yolk oil. So, so we get an animal based phosphatech. So we, we extract phosphocoline and lipids from egg yolks and in that 10 to 15 milliliters per day. Right. So it’s kind of the equivalent of three to four egg yolks per day. Um, and just when we have it in an extracted version then it gets the absorption is more dynamic and we do little fun stuff with the. The gut micro the gut barrier. So when you. We can actually. When you. If you take protome neuro plus phosphocholine simultaneously animal based then you actually deliver DHA phosphatelcholine into your blood supply. And when you take animal based phosphocholine plus proton glia you deliver OIC acid phosphatecholine into the blood supply. Because it it during the digestion process phospho choline gets digested into lyso PC and lyso PC passes through the gut barrier and then it gets reattached on the other side back into the phospholine molecule. So when we co treat people then we can actually. We can use the your own gut barrier metabolism to customize what’s actually being delivered to the human body. And so which is kind of cool. So that’s kind of where. So in that. In that range.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:25:14]:
Okay, thank you so much, Dr. Goodenow. This was just an amazing amount of information for all of your listeners. Thank you for spending your time with us. We will be sending out the replay with the transcript and the video. So you’ll be able to watch that sometime next week after my staff are able to to turn that around. Feel free to share that with other people. I heard from one of the participants that there was an issue with Eventbrite. So my deepest apologies for technology issues. Hopefully everyone will get the replay even if you weren’t able to make the live video recording. And then our next webinar will be February 7th at 11am Also Pacific Time with Dr. Jack Wolfson who is a cardiologist. So we’ll be talking about safeguarding your cardiac health in a toxic world. And of course now we know all about plasmalogen so we can apply that plasmalogen principle to our cardiac health. Thank you so much, Dr. Goodenow. It was a pleasure to spend time with you.

Dr. Dayan Goodenowe [01:26:27]:
Pleasure. Thank you everybody.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:26:29]:
Bye bye everyone. Thank you again.

Chat Transcript

It was a pleasure to host The Spring Center’s very own PA-C, Matthew McGarvey, for our most recent webinar. Matt and I dove into the science of GLP-1 agonists, explaining their mechanisms for weight loss while emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive, sustainable approach. We explored how protein optimization and resistance training are critical for preserving muscle mass during weight loss and preventing metabolic slowdown. Our discussion highlighted the often-overlooked role of environmental toxins stored in fat cells and how proper detoxification supports healthier, long-term weight management. Matt and I shared practical strategies to maximize weight loss results safely, such as personalized protein goals, detox support, and addressing nutrient deficiencies. This was an insightful and informational conversation–thanks for tuning in!

Recommended products from the conversation with Matt:

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:00:03]:
Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today we have a special treat. The Spring Center, Pennsylvania. Matt McCarvey and I are going to be talking about. McGarvey. Sorry, McGarvey and I are going to BE talking about GLP agonists, what they are, how they could be beneficial in the context of a whole weight loss program, lifestyle program, and answering any questions that you have. We’re going to start off by talking between ourselves and so hopefully a lot of the questions that you may have will be answered in our conversation. But then we’ll open up to questions in later on in our program. We typically run about an hour and a half or so. We’ll see how it goes today. But before we get too much further into this, I did want to welcome everyone. My assistant Michelle is in the chat, so she’ll be hanging out to answer any questions or share any websites that happen to come up. I would ask that if you do have questions, put them in the Q and A rather than the chat. But if you want to go ahead and give us a shout out where you are tuning in from. We always love to see where people are coming from in the world. That’s so much fun. Thank you JD for being here. How cool. In the UK. Let’s see. So Mr. McGarvey is a physician’s assistant. He’s been with me for oh, four years now and prior to that he’s been practicing for 10 years. He did his training at Midwestern in Arizona. He also completed the Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona under Dr. Andrew Weil. So we’re really grateful to have him. He loves to talk about weight training and lifestyle and nutrition. And so he’s the perfect person to help guide us in this realm of GLP1 agonist. So thank you so much for being here, Matt.

Matt McGarvey [00:02:32]:
Thank you, Dr. McCann.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:02:34]:
Okay, so why don’t actually you start and tell us a little bit about how this became an area of interest for you. The whole kind of weight training, diet, etc. All that. I think that because it’s important.

Matt McGarvey [00:02:52]:
Yeah. So I think my, the, the birth of that was looking at my family health history. My mom’s a insulin dependent type 1 diabetic, been that way for almost 60 years now. And she’s, I think she’s the poster child for how to optimize a type 1 diabetes lifestyle even before I became aware of these things. But learning about what that meant on a physiological level, even before graduate level, you know, training, it’s like, oh, hey, like Lifestyle can really help, so that was important. Also a big family history of just heart disease. So learning that nutrition and exercise played a key role in that. So it was really a matter of, oh, hey, I don’t want to be assigned that same, you know, sentences so to say, or that rap sheet. So let’s, you know, take advantage of that now and try and build a really strong foundation so I don’t have to make these big changes later decades in my life when maybe it’s a little bit harder. So that was kind of the iteration of that. And then when you start doing that and you see the benefits for yourself, it just kind of just cascades into like, like a lifestyle.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:04:04]:
Very cool. I didn’t know that about your mom. How awesome is that, that she’s been able to optimize her health? Okay, so. And you also weight train too. So tell us a little bit about that, and then maybe we can use that to segue into why weight training in particular is so important for health and longevity and weight loss.

Matt McGarvey [00:04:33]:
Yeah, so it definitely started for vain, superficial reasons. You know, high school boy. You see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he won, I don’t know, it was Mr. Universe or the Olympia or whatever it was, but there’s. There are those pictures and you’re like, what boy doesn’t want to look like that? So that was the start and I just really enjoyed it. There was something that just kind of clicked. It was a very primal sensation, like, oh, this is what my body is supposed to do. There’s this sense of potential that can be accomplished. I think Socrates said, I forgot the exact quote, but something about it’s a shame for a man not to experience what his physical potential is by being active and exercising. There’s a really good quote for it, and I’m don’t have it off the top of my head, so.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:05:18]:
Sounds great.

Matt McGarvey [00:05:21]:
So obviously the, the superficial vanity reasons are great for it. And then you kind of start to learn a little bit more about why it’s beneficial from a, like, metabolic health perspective. And I think the coolest thing about exercise that I like to mention to people is that it’s a mechanism that will lower your blood sugar without insulin. So the fancy term is like non insulin mediated glucose transport. So there’s a specific receptor, there’s like, I don’t know, five different glucose transport receptors in the body. There’s probably more than that. But glute four is, like, concentrated in the muscle tissue. And when you exercise, when the muscle contracts those that there’s a cascade that signals those receptors to literally translocate into muscle cell membranes and the glucose just pours in. So your muscles are like kind of like a, I’ve heard the term, like a glucose sink essentially. So it’s the easiest mechanism to help lower your blood sugar acutely and then create this kind of long term metabolic benefit from the adaptations that take place with consistent training.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:06:29]:
Very cool. So let’s talk about the philosophy that you and I really have in deciding to even talk about GLP agonists and certainly starting our own weight loss program at the Spring center. Because I think there’s potential criticism for this idea that, oh, we’re, you know, we’re functional medicine providers and therefore we should do things naturally. So share that with our audience.

Matt McGarvey [00:07:06]:
Yeah. So I’ll be the first to admit when I first heard about these medications, I was very skeptical, like kind of, I wouldn’t say angry, but like, no, like we gotta do it the right way. Diet, exercise, get your sleep in, manage your stress. And that’s the tried and true way to do it. Because we, I mean, you’ve been practicing medicine longer than I have, but we’ve seen, you know, weight loss medications come and go, mainly go for, you know, health consequential reasons. Um, and then a couple, I mean, a couple patients of ours said they were having it prescribed from them or finding a way to get it through other practitioners. And I was asking them, hey, are you, you know, are you having success with it? And they said they were. And I asked, were you getting any education about how to, you know, maximize, optimize the use of this medication since you’re, you know, probably paying a good amount for it if you’re paying for it out of pocket. And they said no. But they were losing weight so they didn’t really care. It’s like, okay, I mean, baseline losing weight will definitely be helpful. But that kind of struck a chord with me and I realized that these aren’t going anywhere. If anything, there’s just a, this building tsunami that’s going to take place of their popularity. And even within the. Since we’ve started the program and I was working on kind of writing the details of it, all these online telemedicine, telehealth startups started popping up. Like they’re like, we’ll mail it to you overnight and meet with the doctor and you don’t have to do labs and you can get it no matter what. And that scared me.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:08:36]:
Yeah.

Matt McGarvey [00:08:38]:
Kind of like telemedicine at the very beginning of like the pandemic, like, it was kind of like the wild, wild west. And I feel like we’re kind of dealing with that iteration of that with the GLP ones with weight loss now. So I said, okay, all right, I have to, all right, if you can’t beat them, join them, but do it better. So that, that was kind of the impetus for this, was like, they’re not going to go anywhere. And I’d rather have my patients be under yours and mine’s tutelage for this monitoring labs, really creating like as optimal of a program as I, as I think it can be for them and that level of care, obviously that we provide and then obviously weaving in the detoxification components as well that I think go extremely under discussed, if not discussed at all in the context of weight loss. So I was antagonistic too. But if you can reframe it in the sense of it’s a tool in the toolbox and it’s a very effective tool, it’s a very powerful tool, but it’s not the only tool, then I think we can honor that. We know the diabetes and obesity epidemic is just out of control and not.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:09:54]:
Not being addressed at all really in a way that’s going to be helpful for most people without some additional support.

Matt McGarvey [00:10:07]:
Right. And I there the. There’s already so much tribalism and cultural warfare in regards to diet and nutrition, even with exercise. So if we can at least put that noise aside for a second and agree that, hey, a lot of people are going to need a tool, they’re going to need some help. Sheer willpower and just force of nature can only get you so far for some people. There are those that can flip the switch. Maybe they started a week and a half ago on January 1st and are achieving success. And by the time we get to March or April, they’ve achieved their goals or are on track to do that and sustain it. And awesome. God bless you. But unfortunately, that’s likely not the case for a lot of people. So once again, I just feel like the idea that it’s a tool in the toolbox, it’s not the end all, be all. It seems to be pretty cool when used appropriately.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:11:05]:
Right, right. And, and that’s the beauty of functional and integrative medicine is that we have the capacity to use all the tools. Right. We know when to refer to orthopedics when people need a surgery. And we can also use diet, lifestyle, nutrition supplements, functional medicine testing to optimize people’s health. So why not use the tools that are out There and. And help people do it in a way that makes the most sense for them, you know, because one of the big criticisms of the GLP1s is, well, you stop them and you gain all the weight back. Right, right, right. So maybe speak to why that happens for people.

Matt McGarvey [00:11:55]:
Yeah. So probably helps to explain kind of some general mechanisms. So the major mechanism of action of them is slowing gastric emptying, reducing what’s called intestinal motility. Intestinal motility. So that parasolic contraction that moves food through your gastrointestinal tract. So the longer the food sits there, the longer you’re going to remain full. So there’s less of that signaling to need to eat again. Which ultimately what it really boils down to is you’re just going to end up eating less because you’re getting full off of a lower volume of food or less food in a given period of time. So you end up in a caloric deficit, you’re going to lose weight. The issue with. Or that main criticism, which is a very fair criticism, is that education about proper nutrition is not given. So people probably are just continuing to eat the way they ate before starting the medication, which is partially why they needed to be on the medication in the first place. Maybe that recognition isn’t quite there or brought to their attention by their practitioner, and then they lose the weight. Scale says this. They’re really happy. Clothes fit a certain way, they’re ecstatic about their results. They’re like, all right, cool, I’ve achieved my goal. I’m ready to come off of this. Hopefully there’s a discussion about tapering off, because I think that’s a nuance that’s probably worth discussing and utilizing, but maybe later, later in this conversation. So if you are continuing to eat the way you ate and you stop the medication and your appetite starts to build back up and you’re eating the way you normally ate, and then you just eat more of what you’re already eating prior to the weight loss in the first place. You’re right back to where you were. So that there’s that rebound weight gain. And depending on what dose of the medication you were taking, how profound of that, how profound of that kind of leptin, ghrelin, appetite regulation was taking place, it could come back even stronger to where you maybe even overeat and not just rebound weight gain, but potentially, like, balloon back towards where you were at the beginning, which would obviously we would love to avoid.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:14:03]:
Right? Right, Absolutely. Another mechanism that I remember hearing about on Oprah was this whole Idea of the food noise. So the food noise dissipates and goes away and people just don’t even think about food. And having tried it myself a little bit, it was amazing to appreciate. Like there was no food chatter, there was no internal dialogue with myself, do I go get that, you know, snack or what am I going to have for dinner? Because I really didn’t care. So I, I think that that’s a, an amazing aspect of these medications for the people who. Food noise is a huge issue. Above, above and beyond just that general sensation of satiety.

Matt McGarvey [00:14:58]:
Agreed. Yeah. And patients we’ve been working with so far have said that kind of inner dialogue about that just is non existent. They just don’t think about food the way they used to.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:15:10]:
Right, yeah, it’s fascinating. Let’s talk about the environmental toxicant piece too because I think that this is really important in the conversation for us to be having and for people to start to learn about because it’s not being talked about at all.

Matt McGarvey [00:15:31]:
Right, yeah. So I mean, and a lot of my knowledge about this comes from you and you know, your mentorship. A lot of, you know, environmental toxicants, herbicides, pesticides, the forever chemicals, parabens, phthalates, all those things are fat soluble usually or lipophilic. So whether it’s, we’re exposed to them through whatever means or mechanisms we are, they likely end up in our fat tissue, our adipocytes or potentially they’re so inflammatory and irritating towards our system that our body will almost build new fat cells, hyperplasia around it to encase it, to protect us from it. So they’re there, we’re all exposed, we’re all, we all have some sort of like toxic soup, just kind of steady state in our body somewhere in our fat tissue, more likely than not. So when we lose weight, what we’re doing, when we’re in that caloric deficit, our body needs fuel and we’re not getting it from our daily intake of calories. So we will start to. Once we burn through our liver glycogen, which you will probably do in like 24 hours, realistically you start to tap into your body fat and that’s, that’s the goal, that’s what we’re trying to do. The problem is that’s where the toxins are stored. So as that fat mass dissipates, those toxins are liberated, they enter into circulation, they’re likely going to have to go through, you know, phase one, phase two, detox in the liver. So depending on how quickly the Weight is lost depending on how toxic you are, which are obviously, you know, unique variables to each person in each situation. You could be facing a perfect storm of not great circumstances if your liver is not also functioning at its great capacity, which, depending on weight, things like that may not have been because of that or even other reasons prior. So I think obviously I’ll can tag you in for kind of building off of that. But, yeah, something needs to be aware of. And I think it’s probably from my prior experience thinking back on when I’ve lost weight or helped other patients in my previous jobs help lose weight. Like you feel crappy because you’re in a caloric deficit. That’s just. It’s just gonna happen. Energy levels drop, you’re maybe not as sharp as you want to be, but it makes me think back like, oh, that’s also probably like, you know, it’s probably. Yeah, the detoxification component. And your body’s just a little bit overwhelmed with everything it has to deal with on top of this, you know, the stress of, you know, being in a caloric deficit. I’m like, oh, no wonder you feel like crap or have the potential to.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:18:02]:
Right. And the interesting thing with the GLP agonist is oftentimes people don’t feel crappy because they don’t have that food noise and they have more satiety given the mechanisms. But, you know, I think that there are two real key points that I, that I want our listeners to understand is that what. One, the weight gain is often associated with the environmental toxic and exposures. And, you know, if you look at pictures of, you know, people on the beach in California in the 1970s, just groups of people, and then you look at people on the beach in the, you know, 2000s, the. The vast majority of people previously are thin and the vast majority of people now are overweight. And yes, we can point to the, the. All the chemicals in our foods and the pesticides and the additives and preservatives and all that crap in our food and the fact that, you know, everything has been supersized and we’re eating too much. But I also think that it’s. It’s because there are so many environmental chemicals in the environment, and as Matt said, many of them are fat soluble, which means they’re going to hang out in the fat cells. And so I think that part of the weight epidemic, the diabetes epidemic, is because of these toxins. And, you know, nobody’s talking about that.

Matt McGarvey [00:19:43]:
No, at least. Yeah. At least in the context like, of like within the context of weight loss, I know your colleagues have been, yeah, like Dr. Crinian and other people have definitely written on it, but in the context of. We have, it’s. I mean, I don’t want to call it a revolution, but like, I think this is one of the most promising times we have in the context of weight loss and maybe really starting to halt the progress of the diabetes obesity epidemic. It really needs to be an active conversation we’re having and to plug in for, you know, since we’re in 2025, maybe RFK Jr. Can hopefully, hopefully have a little bit of, a little bit of sway in instituting at least some, even some small changes in that regard.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:20:24]:
Absolutely. So to get back to our situation, lots of environmental chemicals, hundreds of thousands of environmental chemicals bombarding our bodies. And our bodies are doing their absolute, absolute best to manage it by shoving it into a fat cell where it’s going to be as safe as possible. Right. So this is, you know, the body is so smart, it’s always doing what it can, as best as it can to protect us. So it shoves it in a fat cell, so it’s safe there. But then when we start to lose weight, whether you’re using the GLP agonist or not, the fat cells shrink because they’re being used for, for fuel. And all those toxicants flood the body, the system. And now we feel terrible and we’re having detox reactions. And so part of what we designed the weight loss program to do is to really focus on that detox piece. So we’ll definitely get back to that. But before we get there, I do want to talk a little bit about. So when people decide to lose weight, whether it’s with the GLP1s or without the GLP ones, talk us through some of the key points that you really want to emphasize with patients to make sure that they’re, you know, maintaining what they, what they need to maintain, like their muscle mass.

Matt McGarvey [00:21:56]:
Right? So this is where. This is my, this is my hill. This is my hill. Protein, protein, protein, protein. We can, and I tell patients this all the time. We can talk about the toxicity and issues and nuances of fitness and bodybuilding and that culture and those issues and performance enhancing drugs and all that. But let’s throw that out the window for a second. The bros, the bodybuilders have known for decades that protein is king. And it’s true. Protein is the most important macronutrient. It is the most satiating macronutrient, which satiety is the sense that you are physically full. Like my stomach is full, it’s at capacity. But also that is coupled with that psychological satisfaction of I don’t need to take another bite. That’s how I like to describe satiety, is like, I’m good. Whether there’s food left on your plate or not, it’s like, I’m good, I don’t need to, I don’t need to, I don’t need it. More intake and protein is king for that. And a lot of that is just based off of its chemical structure. The amino acids, the peptide bonds, just from a physiological digestive perspective, they take longer to break down than the fatty acid esters or like the glucose rings in like sugar molecules. So it just sits in your stomach longer already than those other macronutrients do. So protein intake is extremely important not just for the satiety component, but also from a micronutrient perspective. Most, most sources of protein are very nutrient dense, even if we’re not. I mean, ideally, in ideal world, everything’s like grass fed, grass finished, pasture raised, organic. Like, you know what your food, the quality of what your food eats affects the quality of that food and thus affects, you know, you ultimately. But even then, like, you know, conventional isn’t, it’s not a sin to, to, you know, get conventional beef or conventional chicken at the end of the day if, you know, the economics aren’t quite there yet. So they’re the most nutrient dense sources of things. So you’re going to get the most bioavailable versions of your heme, iron, your zinc, your copper, all your B vitamins, you’re going to get your fat soluble vitamins, the A, D, E, K Adeks of the world. So that’s extremely important, especially in the context of weight loss when you’re going to be eating less. So you really want to leverage that nutrient density, not just the macro perspective in the context of like maintaining muscle mass, which I can explain in a little bit more detail, but also the micronutrients because you’re going to need those for all those enzymatic reactions, for making your own neurotransmitters, for supporting those detoxification pathways.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:24:27]:
Yeah, yeah. So how do you know how much protein you need to take?

Matt McGarvey [00:24:34]:
That is a great question. And part of the program at the spring center for weight loss is the use of our inbody scan machine. This is a bioelectrical impedance device that helps calculate your body fat percentage and then based off of that, it gives us your skeletal muscle mass, your body Fat mass and then it does its algorithms and calculations to determine body fat percentage based off of that. So kind of the age old adage, once again from the fitness kind of bodybuilding community is roughly 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass. Which is why that in body is so important is because it gives us that number. So I can tell you literally day one, you walk in to talk about the program if you’re interested in it. Regardless of Whether we do GLP1s or not, this is how much protein you should be eating. And that’s you know, not to circle back to kind of the criticism some of the other places is most people are probably under eating protein as it is anyway. And it’s very, I would say 80% of our patients and even just life in general when patient, when people, friends want to ask me about protein intake and I tell them yeah, this is probably what you should be eating. The look, that kind of the jaw drop of that much. Yeah. Oh, oh, that’s okay.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:25:48]:
Yeah, it’s a tremendous amount for a lot of people. I’ve gotten pretty good at guesstimating based on people’s body composition and, and whatnot, what, what amounts. But can you give us some ideas of like how much protein a certain weight person might need?

Matt McGarvey [00:26:11]:
Yeah, so I found that like if, and usually in like the 100, like 150 pound or like even 200 pound range, obviously like body fat percentage dictates that but basement bare minimum likely like will likely need more but just safe daily non negotiable amount would probably be around a hundred grams of protein a day which is probably, I think it’s probably double the rda which. The RDA is a joke. Um, I was telling I think a few patients yesterday like the RDA is based off of like the whole population. If you think about how healthy the whole population is and the fact that they’re not healthy, then you probably want to throw that out the window. RDA is meant to like prevent deficiencies, not to make sure you’re healthy and optimizing your lifestyle. So when that context is, is brought to the forefront, it, it’s still daunting to maybe double your protein intake potentially. But it seems more reasonable, more reasonable of an idea than just this arbitrary like. No, you have to do it this way.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:27:09]:
Right? Yes. So gosh, what was I going to say? Anyway, keep going. I’m sure there’s other things you want to share and I’ll come back with some questions.

Matt McGarvey [00:27:20]:
Yeah, so that pro. The, the protein outside of its benefit from the micronutrients, the macronutrients. The satiety is its role in maintaining muscle mass, protein. There’s, there’s only two things outside of steroids, two, two natural things you can do that will promote what’s called muscle protein synthesis. So actually building muscle mass, or bare minimum of the maintenance of muscle mass, but ideally building it. One is resistance training, lifting weights, which we’ll talk about probably shortly. Um, and number two is protein intake. Um, and Dr. Gabrielle Lyons is a, a amazing human. She’s a physician in New York. I think she does geriatric and kind of like longevity medicine now. And she’s the muscle centric kind of queen. So I, I always mentioned her name when this comes up. Cause she’s such a great resource and explains things very well and very practically. Um, but she talks about this, the, the kind of, these protein boluses that you get at meals. And if you’re getting like 20 to 30 grams of protein at a meal, even regardless of body size, you’re going to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And you want to be doing that a couple times a day, ideally probably three, realistically. And then that need is different kind of per how you know, how much weight training you’ve done, other, other physiological concerns, but you’re getting that stimulus. And back when they could do like metabolic ward studies where, you know, lock people in the hospital wing, control for every variable completely, and they would do protein overfeeding studies where they would, you know, no, no exercise nothing, but give people like potentially even 1 gram of pound. 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. Not even just lean body mass, but body weight and maybe even 1.5.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:29:01]:
Oh my gosh.

Matt McGarvey [00:29:02]:
Technically they would call that an overfeeding study, but they controlled for the other macronutrients, the fat and the carbohydrates. Without weight training and protein overfeeding, people still built muscle and lost body fat. So like the holy grail that we’re all, you know, trying to accomplish was achieved with optimizing protein, protein intake, even without the context of resistance training. So then if you add in resistance training, it’s not like one plus one equals two in that context. Like high protein intake plus resistance training is more like one plus one equals five, realistically.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:29:35]:
Super cool. Um, do you have some tables in your head of like, su food sources and how much protein you can get? Um, so for example, I remember eggs, which everybody thinks harsh, you know, so high protein. Well, they’re six grams of protein per egg.

Matt McGarvey [00:29:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. One Egg is six grams of protein, which is great. And the, the, the yolk is so nutrient dense and rich with so many good things for you. But yeah, two eggs is 12 grams of protein. That’s not gonna cut it. You need like 4 to 5. Right. You can get 25, 30 grams of protein. Um, in the context of most animal proteins, give or take a gram or two here or there. But roughly 3 ounces of really any protein is gonna be about 23 ounces of protein is 3 ounces of an animal meat is gonna be about 20 grams of protein, give or take. So if you extrapolate that upwards of like a pound, a pound of most animal protein is gonna get you over a hundred grams. So if we’re, you know, kind of chopping that up throughout the course of the day.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:34]:
Right. That seems more doable. And then do you have on the top of your head some of the protein, the, the plant based protein options for people.

Matt McGarvey [00:30:48]:
That I am probably not as that’s good at unfortunately.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:30:54]:
But there are tables out there that are very easy to find on the Internet where you can, you know, say how much protein am I getting? And I’m going to get in a cup of certain kinds of beans or legumes for the people who need to do that. Um, and then, you know, I mean I’ve taken to supplementing with collagen even though it’s not a complete protein and that seems to help too. So there are ways to support protein intake in addition to food.

Matt McGarvey [00:31:25]:
Right, Right. Yeah. And I, I, I think I found through, I don’t, I don’t know how long we’ve even been doing this now, but I found almost everybody probably has been asking about that at least maybe a couple months in, um, probably need to do a protein shake. It seems like that last 20 to 30 grams by the end of the day is a little bit of a challenge. So protein shake usually hits that metric pretty quickly.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:31:47]:
Um, which kinds of proteins are you recommending for most people in that?

Matt McGarvey [00:31:51]:
Um, I know the majority of patients in our practice have dairy issues. So whey protein unfortunately gets thrown out the window for most people. Whey protein is awesome if you tolerate dairy and don’t have gastrointestinal issues. Um, there are definitely like, there’s a spectrum of quality. If you’re gonna, if you can tolerate dairy, grass fed, grass finished whey protein is great. Um, if you can’t, what I have been recommending for people is like beef isolate based protein powders. Sounds kind of crazy. Um, it’s basically like Powdered steak. Um, I like equip foods there. It’s called prime protein. It’s like two or three ingredients. It’s very clean. I’ve had patients in the practice use it and not have any issues with it. I have it at home personally. I used it with my son Milo, who had a dairy sensitivity for most of his life when he couldn’t drink cow’s milk. And it was great. So that there’s also like egg and egg white protein. But I know kind of down the line of dairy sensitivities, there’s a lot of egg allergies and egg sensitivities. So that can also throw, throw us for a little bit of a loop there. So beef isolate tends to be my go to option. And then as you mentioned, collagen isn’t a complete protein, but a lot of people aren’t getting it in their diet anyway, so it’s nice to be able to have that and it even more so than like other proteins. It mixes in almost anything.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:33:15]:
Yes, very true. I put 30 grams of collagen in my coffee in the morning and you know, it’s not ideal, but it’s certainly better than nothing. And I now have a starting to develop a beef issue and can’t do whey, so collagen for me. But there are other proteins too. You could do hemp protein, for example. There are, you know, pea proteins or other non animal proteins that are, that are out there as well if you want to try those. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit more about resistance training.

Matt McGarvey [00:33:55]:
Yeah. So one of the big critiques from kind of other like functional medicine, the people on the podcasts and the book writers of our, of our world, is that a lot of the weight that has been lost, and it’s in the pharmaceutical studies, it’s in Eli Lilly and the other companies that make these. It’s in their study literature that anywhere from 20 to 40% of the total weight loss is muscle mass. And so, for example, if you lost 40 pounds, that’s anywhere from 8 to 16 pounds of muscle. And that’s great that 30, anywhere from 20 to 30 pounds of fat was lost simultaneously. But there’s a point where, and those are averages. So some people optimized it way better than that. And a lot of people probably fell on the other side of the bell curve where it could have been closer to like 50, 50. And there, I don’t know what the exact number is or if there’s a ratio or an equation, but there’s a point where that muscle mass loss is probably more deleterious than the benefit of the losing the body fat because you’re losing that metabolic. Like you’re losing your metabolism essentially because like majority of your basal metabolic rate outside of your brain and your heart is your muscle tissue. So if you’re losing that, you’re kind of creating a huge uphill battle of if your basal metabolic rate was like 1400 calories in a 24 hour period time it could drop to like 1100. So less food is going to be more likely to promote weight gain kind of after the fact. So besides a leveraging protein in the context of weight loss, especially with the GLP1s when appetite suppression is obviously the goal, but makes eating more challenging. So leveraging protein and take. The other most important thing that can be done is resistance training. And that’s doesn’t mean joining a CrossFit gym. It doesn’t mean, you know, walking into Golds in Venice. Um, it just means some form of res. Resistance dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, your body weight. You know, if you look at anyone that like, if you look at the, the gymnasts, the male gymnasts from the Olympics this past year, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would deny that they would want to look like those guys. Um, and that’s all body weight. Um, so the question then becomes like how much, how often? Frequency. Um, and I think kind of the, I like to think of things in like the, the like baseline, like this is hopefully like general operating capacity and that’d be about three times a week for about 30 minutes. Ideally more in an ideal world, definitely more. But that’s kind of my, the stimulus needed. Um, and ideally we’re focusing on what my, from my personal training days way back when, what we would call compound movements. So movements that involve multiple joints, thus multiple muscle groups at a time. So things that look like a squat, things that look like a lunge, pushups, pull ups, press movements that said elbow, shoulder, knees, hips, things like that versus you know, a bicep curl or like a leg extension, which those have a time and they have a place. But if we’re kind of going for efficiency, maximizing our time, the more muscle groups involved, the more stimulus we’re going to get, the more of a metabolic response and benefit we’re going to achieve through that adaptive process.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:37:20]:
Well, and they’re more useful kind of lifestyle promoting movements, right?

Matt McGarvey [00:37:28]:
True, very true.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:37:29]:
I thought that was the whole idea of CrossFit is that you want to become healthy but you’re doing these movements so that, you know, you maintain your balance, you maintain your flexibility, you maintain all of these other things. So as a part of healthy aging, it’s, it’s all, it’s all in there, right?

Matt McGarvey [00:37:49]:
Yeah, the. And when it comes to muscle, it’s kind of the. This quote actually does apply. Like if you don’t use it, you do lose it, unfortunately. And I think outside of the obesity and diabetes kind of epidemic we’re facing, I think we’re facing an issue of healthy aging, not just with these kind of surges in neurodegenerative disease and other just kind of complications of just living on this planet a very long time. But sarcopenia, this kind of skinny fatness, this low muscle, just carrying a low amount of muscle, I think is really kind of underlying a lot of these other chronic problems where maybe BMI looks perfectly normal, but if you did hop on an inbody, those ratios would tell us that, hey, there’s a little bit more of a problem going on. And maybe there’s actually a substantial amount of visceral fat that we just can’t gauge through other means. And that’s important for metabolism. We know that exercise promotes the production of bdnf, brain derived neurotrophic factors. So it helps maintain neuroplasticity. And it also just makes you more robust in the sense of preventing osteopenia, osteoporosis. And you know, if you did happen to fall, the more muscle you carry, the more shock absorption you have. So we’re buffering against those unfortunate potentialities that become more likely as we age.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:39:11]:
Yes, absolutely. So it sounds like everyone can benefit from an in body scan.

Matt McGarvey [00:39:20]:
It’s a great diagnostic tool that really kind of makes BMI and scale weight just almost archaic at this point. But it’s not accessible. So that’s, that’s a little bit complicated. But I don’t know, they’re, they’re becoming cheaper. More and more gyms are having them. More and more fitness studios are having, more and more medical practices are having them. We have them, which is great. So even if you’re not doing the weight loss program, I think understanding like, you know, just like how much muscle mass do you carry? How much fat do you carry? How is that kind of segmented throughout your body? Do you want to maybe build some more upper body strength versus lower body strength? You can learn all that just from standing on this little machine for three minutes? If not even three minutes?

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:40:01]:
Yeah, a minute and a half, two minutes. So yeah, I think it’s very important. A lot of our older patients, perimenopausal, postmenopausal patients especially, it would be very important to do those in body scans, because some of the greatest health risks as we age for little white women and little Asian women is, is hip fractures and, and spinal fractures, which then lead to deconditioning difficulty with mobilization, and people kind of circle the drain. And if you don’t know that you’re skinny fat, meaning you don’t have enough muscle mass. Right. That’s kind of what we’re talking about. So people look good, but they don’t have that muscle mass need. That can really set people up for difficulties long term. And so getting, getting an inbody scan and figuring out what is your lean muscle mass compared to your fat mass and also the visceral fat. So can you explain a little bit more about the visceral fat?

Matt McGarvey [00:41:11]:
Yeah. So the inbody does, has an algorithm that calculates your visceral fat. So we have subcutaneous fat, which is what sits under our skin. It’s what insulates us, it’s what agonizes us when we look in the mirror. But then there’s visceral fat, which is a fat that lines our abdominal cavity and lines in our abdominal organs. And we all have a little bit. It’s as we gain weight, though, that can also gain as well. And unfortunately, and I don’t know the exact reason why off the top of my head, but visceral fat almost acts like an endocrine organ in and of itself. It can secrete adipokines and other hormones, which can hijack our own pathways. And obviously, once it’s there, it doesn’t want to go away. So it’s not helping promote its own shrinking. It’s promoting its own preservation. So it’s hijacking that leptin, ghrelin, appetite regulation, satiety system. It’s extremely inflammatory. It’s messing up hormonal communication pathways. So knowing what’s there can tell us a lot about not just like, you know, kind of how are you distributing that fat in your body, but also like, you know, maybe you don’t have any obvious risk. Maybe your lipid panel looks relatively normal. Maybe even some of the more intense inflammatory markers that we had run on like a Cleveland. Heart labs look relatively okay, but you’re walking around with a visceral fat. That’s considered high risk. We need to have a conversation and help you reduce that, because obviously you’re just not. That risk isn’t as obvious as it is when you see it on blood work versus just that number on an inbody scan result page.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:42:49]:
Right. So it really should be a part of somebody’s annual physical exam when they’re going to the doctor and talking about health risks and doing blood work to help the practitioner. And you yourself as a patient, put together the pieces so that you know what you need to do in order to. To stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Matt McGarvey [00:43:11]:
Exactly.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:43:12]:
Okay, so shall we talk specifically about the GLP1 peptides? First of all, what’s a peptide?

Matt McGarvey [00:43:23]:
A peptide is a string of amino acids not long enough to be considered a protein, and I don’t know what that exact number is for the cutoff of that. But just a string of amino acids. That’s it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:43:37]:
Right, Right. So not large enough for a protein, but a string of amino acids. And these medications, these peptides, can be administered orally and also by injections, correct?

Matt McGarvey [00:43:56]:
Correct. Yeah. The oral versions are, I think, pretty new. And then the subcutaneous ones have been around, actually. I think there’s been, I mean, semaglutide and now tirzepatide. The ozempics and Manjaros of the world are a little bit. But there is liraglutide and dulaglutide kind of. I remember learning about those in grad school, strictly in the context of type 2 diabetes. I don’t know if they had the same appetite suppression, gastric motility promoting effects that these versions do. So maybe they probably didn’t, because I think they would have figured that out 10 years ago if they could have.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:44:31]:
Right, right. So if somebody was interested, who would be a good candidate for a GLP agonist?

Matt McGarvey [00:44:42]:
I think. I mean, it’s hard to say, like, anyone who really wants to lose a fair amount of weight. And that could be £15, it could be £100. I. And it’s mainly just because I haven’t maybe personally dabbled with them myself to kind of have those effects. I would be a little bit hesitant to maybe say if someone wanted to lose like ten pounds in like, six weeks to go on, like, you know, a high school reunion or some sort of, like, vacation or something like that. I don’t know. Maybe that would be okay. And I’m maybe just probably just overthinking it. But I guess my goal would be, like, in saying that my goal is to really help people. The goal is to use the GLP1 as a tool and create this window of opportunity to really optimize lifestyle like that. That’s kind of why I’ve been able to. I wouldn’t call it like make peace with it because I don’t. It doesn’t bother me that I’m using them because I see the results my patients are achieving and I’m like, cool, proof’s in the pudding. I don’t need to have any guilt or shame about that. But when I settle on, hey, this is creating a window of opportunity that we’re. There’s not a tool that’s gonna create it otherwise that we at least know about yet to where we can really preach and teach lifestyle. So that way, once the achieve your goal, we taper off of the medication. The tools are in place to keep you healthy, to keep those results. And it’s not just like the results. It’s not just like, hey, I got to X scale weight or hey, I got to X percentage. It’s hey, I feel good. I’m exercising four days a week. I’ve been able to shave some minutes off my mile time, or I can do 20 push ups when I could only do 10. That’s more ultimately like, it’s a tool. Yeah, it’s ultimately just a tool. But bring it back. Almost anyone that wants to lose weight probably would benefit from it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:46:40]:
Right. So we touched a little bit about some of the side effects and there are a lot of side effects that are in the literature as well as in things like up to date. And some of those side effects can be kind of scary. Can you speak to that? Maybe talk about what are more of the side effects and then what we do to. To mitigate those side effects?

Matt McGarvey [00:47:10]:
Yeah, yeah, they ranged. There’s a, there’s a long, long list of stuff there. They range. Most of them tend to be gastrointestinal in origin. Kind of the more common people have reported me nausea, kind of like just general like gastrointestinal distress. And that can range from constipation to diarrhea one way or the other. It can get more intense, like kind of borderline like gastroparesis, where it’s almost like that intestinal motility is almost like it’s completely shut down. Like, almost like a paralysis. So to say pancreatitis can potentially develop. But I think that’s once again rooted in like, you know, inflammation and other things that should be screened out and addressed potentially beforehand before starting these things. There’s been some, I think thyroid they mentioned, I mean, medullary thyroid cancer is a definitive hard stop contraindication. But they mentioned potential Thyroid issues, I don’t really, I don’t remember. I know they’re reported, but I don’t even really remember coming too much to across too many of them. When I kind of looked at the literature, I think there’s been some recent critiques of like heart muscle shrinkage. I think. I don’t know if that’s just like news TV rating, sensationalization stuff, but I also just, I boil that back down to, well, your heart’s a muscle. If you’re not eating enough protein and you’re not resistance training, then heck, maybe that potentially might be an outcome of it. But if you’re doing the right things, then a lot of these things just tend to be much, much, much less likely.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:48:52]:
Yes. Yeah. So there are some real hard contraindications. Like you mentioned medullary thyroid cancer and some of the pancreas issues. But it’s really important to remember that the side effects are dose related. And so one of the things that I love about the compounded versions of these peptides as opposed to the commerc versions, is that we can adjust the dose so you can take half of the regular starting dose. You can take it twice a week rather than just once a week. And so we can really help gear and reduce the side effects by lowering the doses of things. And many times you and I have both found that most people don’t need the maximal doses.

Matt McGarvey [00:49:43]:
Exactly. And that’s. Yeah, the beautiful part about the using the compounded versions is, is the flexibility kind of that latitude because I’ve seen like kind of hyporesponders, people that did the starting dose and didn’t notice a single thing, they jump up to the next dose, the 5 milligrams from the 2.5, the Tirzepatide Manjaro version specifically, and boom, 10 pounds in a month, 8 pounds of that body fat, only a couple pounds of muscle mass loss. Like that’s beautiful. And then I had some patients where the two point, they did the 2.5, the tirzepatide, and they didn’t eat for three days after the initial injection. And it’s like, well, that’s a, that’s a no go. We’re going to cut that in half and you know, readjust that or there were too many gastrointestinal side effects from injection one, but the dose, you know, after they got over that, the appetite suppression was great. So we talked about a split dose protocol, like do 1.25 on like a Monday and then do the other half on like whatever the half of 168 hours in a week later to kind of maximize that, that span of coverage versus just like a pre filled pen that you pick up from the pharmacy. And that’s just kind of it.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:50:50]:
Right, right. So obviously if you qualify because you’re a diabetic and you can get the commercially available ones and your insurance covers it, fantastic, great. But the, the compounded versions have certainly opened up the world for people who don. Meet the insurance criteria, even if they might have an obesity issue and an elevated bmi. And yeah, it helps us modulate those side effects. So I really, really appreciate the, the compounded peptides. So what other, what other things do you make sure that you tell prospective weight loss patients or want to let our audience know? Because I think we’re going to transition to an some questions here, but I just want to like give you the, the platform to, to share any other information that you think is really important for people to know.

Matt McGarvey [00:51:50]:
Yeah, I, I mean I don’t want to necessarily be too repetitive, but it’s, it’s really just creating that synergy of lifestyle. This, the ability, like maximizing that protein intake. And I know patients, like I said that jaw drop when I tell them how much they need up front. And you know, and that’s why like I enjoy the time I have with people to say, hey, like you don’t have to do that tomorrow. You know, it’s, it’s an, it’s a little bit of an adaptation. So you know, if it takes you a month to get to that point, that’s fine. Like we, we understand that. And that’s like the compliment to that is the resistance training. Cause like I said both, I’ve said prior, like both will independently stimulate that. And then once they’re both optimized, there’s, there’s a really profound synergy between the two. So just understanding that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And also the same thing applies for exercise. If you haven’t stepped foot in a gym or you have a garage gym and it’s just gathered dust over the past decade or so, you’re not going to walk out and be an Olympian on day one. And that’s okay. So just being honest with yourself and if you need resources or help, I don’t know every single thing that’s available, but I’m happy to know. And then there’s personal trainers that are great. Not everyone’s great, but a lot of them are and they love Helping people. You know, just like we love helping people. So, you know, really taking advantage of the fact that, you know, we live in Southern California, there’s a lot of gyms, there’s a lot of personal trainers looking to help people. So I think that’s a, a great resource that definitely should be considered as long as the, you know, the, the socioeconomic component of that is viable.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:53:31]:
Yes. And for those people who are not in Southern California, there are likely, you know, in body scans or something similar, you can actually go to inbody.com I think, and look for other, other gyms or other locations where you could get a scan. I mean, you could just Google body composition scan to get started to try and find a place that would do a similar type sc. And then same thing with the, the medications. I think in different parts of the world, there are different GLP agonists available. And there, I’m sure you can do some research and find other practitioners if we’re not accessible. I think I remembered I did want to ask pick your brain a little bit about some GLP supporting supplements before we go on to answer question, because I know you did a little bit of research about this too. So what are some of the supplements that people could choose if they wanted to try and support this?

Matt McGarvey [00:54:45]:
Yeah, so the two that seem to be the best supported in the literature, one was berberine, which is a beautiful extract, botanical extract, that has a lot of metabolic benefits already, really helps shift lipid profiles, lowers LDL, raises HDL, helps lower A1C and improves insulin sensitivity, and then also has some nice antimicrobial properties that can help kind of modulate if there’s any sort of weird gastrointestinal overgrowth of anything that shouldn’t be there. And then in kind of all of that, it does help kind of your body’s own production of GLP1, which we do produce it naturally. We do produce glucagon, like peptide one, just not in the quantities that we receive when we utilize the peptide version of it extrinsically. So Berberine’s a great one. And then the other one was Akkermansia, which is a probiotic single strain that is really actually like a cornerstone foundational gut health species. But I feel like it gets kind of lost in the conversation of Bifido and Lactobacillus. But it really helps modulate the immune system at the level of the gut. And it’s the L cells in the gut themselves that actually produce that glp. So if they’re happy because they’re covered by beneficial species that are supposed to be there. They’re much more likely to function better versus being inflamed or irritated by some sort of mental or pathogenic critter. Being there.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:16]:
Yes, yes. Akkermansia. And there are some functional stool tests that can identify if you, you have adequate akkermansia or not. So that, that is something to look at when you’re talking about berberine. There are a couple different forms of berberine. So berberine HCL tends to be the one that has the metabolic effects and then there are some other berberines that tend to have more the antimicrobial effect. So just be aware of that when you’re making supplement purchases or talking to practitioners. Okay. Shall we answer some questions?

Matt McGarvey [00:56:57]:
Sounds great.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:56:58]:
Okay. Can you talk about going from regular to microdose peptides when you’ve hit a plateau? Whoops. I start. I think I started at the bottom. Let’s see. Nope, that’s it. Okay, go ahead, Matt.

Matt McGarvey [00:57:16]:
Yeah, so that’s the idea that more of a steady state pulsing of the dose to kind of manage the, the downstream physiology of it is. I’ve seen it gain a lot of steam kind of on the social media platforms and kind of the biohackers of the world have definitely talked about that. And I think it’s a, it can definitely help break through plateaus because I know as people kind of a dose becomes less effective and it’s kind of that receptor saturation and attenuation component that hunger can start to creep in. You know, every seven days we’re doing an injection like day five, day six, and then if that starts to lessen and lessen and we’re already at like, maybe we’ve maxed out the dose or maybe we don’t necessarily want to go a lot higher than that idea of microdosing. And that could be a split dose where, you know, two days a week. But I’ve seen other people, other kind of. Once again, the biohackers of the world do it potentially every other day, which less side effects in doing so, kind of less of these big swings up and down. So you’re just kind of having much more of a modulated effect. I once again don’t know a lot about it. I’ve dabbled. I’ve had some patients do like the split dosing protocol and that saved them a lot of headache with mainly side effects. So I can’t speak to it with like definitive experience with a patient or for myself personally. But there are people out there who definitely have achieved great success with that. So I think, you know, a little bit of self experimentation can’t hurt necessarily. Um, once again, as long as that dosing is you know, really dialed in so far at that 10 milligram dose and you’re gonna do it every other day, you’re doing like you know, 2.5 every other day versus whopping yourself with 10 milligrams every day.

Dr. Kelly McCann [00:59:01]:
The other thing I’d like to say about plateaus is I think it’s important if somebody plateaus or if they even have trouble getting off the starting gate and not losing weight initially. I think it’s important to work with a functional practitioner to really go back and try and figure out what are the root causes. You know, is are you in a moldy building which is causing leptin resistance? Is there some sort of switch that needs to be flipped first before you’ll start to see benefits? With the GLP agonist, you know, other things to think about, maybe somebody has obstructive sleep apnea that’s not being treated or there’s a huge toxic burden. But there are, there are people for whom even max, max doses, they’re, they’re not getting the benefits that they want. So are there other things that you would encourage people to think about if they do plateau? Matt?

Matt McGarvey [01:00:04]:
Um, I would always make sure you’re doubling back to making sure that nutrition is optimized. I mean once again beat the, beat the dead horse, no pun intended. Um, but really like you know you’re supposed to be getting a Hundred grams of 120 grams of protein a day. Are you like, are you definitively like rinse washer Pete every single day? Cuz maybe you’re good for a couple weeks but that’s lagging that hunger starting to creep in a little bit. More of the calories are coming from those other kind of more ener energy dense macronutrients. So never hesitate to like, you know, if you haven’t been logging your nutrition and you want to just make sure you’re on, on par with yourself. Like my fitness pal Chronometer, probably the two main apps I recommend, you know, double check, double check that your, you know, your kind of nutritional needs are where they’re supposed to be. Cuz that’s definitely low hanging fruit that can slip up especially the longer you’re on it as well.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:00:58]:
Is food noise genetic or does it come from something else?

Matt McGarvey [01:01:03]:
That is a great question. I would, that seems more of a environmental thing like if you, it could eventually feed some sort of like, epigenetic thing that maybe regulates some of that. But it does seem like if you’re in an environment where there’s hyperpalatable food that’s always present, that’s always okay. Food was maybe solved as a source of comfort. You are just, like, taught to think about food and maybe not in the healthiest of ways. Then I just get more of that sense from it than genetic. But I’m sure really smart people with lots of letters behind their name will maybe find some genes that regulate that in the next couple decades.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:01:47]:
Yeah. Somebody also mentioned addiction to food. I do think that it’s multifactorial, and I do think that there is an environmental component that has not been elucidated yet that is causing perhaps brain inflammation that’s dysregulating GLP and contributing to that food noise, given all the environmental, toxic and exposures that we’re having. And yeah, I mean, there are a lot of social, emotional, psychological issues surrounding food and using food as medicine, using food as comfort that I think can be playing into that food noise. Although I. I will admit, you know, I. I never thought that I experienced food noise. I’ve been relatively fit and healthy my life, with the exception of my many, many mold exposures. But when I tried tirzepatide for a couple of months to see what it was like, I definitely didn’t think about food and was amazed to realize, oh, I actually do think about food more than I realize now that I’m not thinking about food at all on the GLP agonist. So who knows? Hopefully we can figure out that mystery, because I think it’s a great question. Okay. Do you recommend using protein powders to reach protein goals? And do you have any specific recommendations to MCAS patients that can be sensitive to processed foods? Thanks, Alexis.

Matt McGarvey [01:03:40]:
I think using a protein powder is perfectly fine. Um, it’s a supplement, so it’s meant to be supplemental. Um, so, you know, as long as I would say, like, we’re getting, you know, let’s use a hundred grams of protein as our context. If we’re getting 70 to 80 grams of protein from food, whole foods, and, you know, it’s the end of the day, maybe you worked out that day, so you really need that protein goal. Nothing wrong with a protein shake. Um, especially on the days you work out. Cause that protein needs probably even a little bit higher. Um, but yeah, there’s nothing wrong with it. I think if we’re, like, turning to that as our main source of, of consuming protein, of like, doing like, three Protein shakes a day to hit that. I don’t think that’s ideal cuz just protein, since it is technically a pro, protein powder is a processed food. Despite the big bowls of protein you’re getting, it is definitely not as satiating as eating a steak like that. Chewing, the mastication, all that signaling that comes from those processes definitely is different than drinking a protein shake. Um, so nothing wrong with needing to do it and maybe even I’ve had some patients tell me they have to do it daily. You know, as we’re getting towards kind of their, their getting close to hitting their goal and they’re just that appetite suppression is really profound and that the satiety from that protein is really, really heavy. So a protein shake is allowing them to hit their goals and they’re maintaining their muscle mass. So. So I’m okay with that. I think the key thing with yeah mast cell is obviously, you know, how long is that ingredient list? And do you know if you have a, a reaction, a previous reaction or known sensitivity to potentially one of those things in there that I mentioned? The equipped foods prime protein, it’s like beef isolate stevia and then I think the flavor of the protein itself. And they do have an unflavored protein powder. I can’t imagine that tastes good. Most unflavored protein powders, regardless of whether it’s beef or whey or egg, I can’t imagine. I’ve tried unflavored whey protein powder way back in the day and it’s like drinking liquid chalk. Do not recommend it. Um, so I think the like the shorter the ingredient list, the knowing your own personal history of kind of reactivity and sensitivity to things, if you don’t then you know, dabble, maybe don’t do a full scoop to start. You know, quarter scoop, half a scoop, see how you do tolerate it and then. And if that works, don’t just jump to a full scoop. And can you comment further from.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:06:01]:
And I know that collagen can be high histamine for some people. So some people might need to be conscientious or careful with collagen. And as I mentioned, it’s not a complete protein. So looking at some other sources that might be viable. The other thing to think about too is supplementing with amino acids. Just the straight amino acids. Been playing around with that. They’re not great tasting either, but maybe somewhere with electrolytes and your amino acids you can find something that you can just get back. Okay. If someone is underweight, less than 100 pounds and has low muscle mass and needs to gain muscle weight. How would they best estimate their protein.

Matt McGarvey [01:06:51]:
Needs in body scan? DEXA scan, Using some sort of diagnostic tool to truly know your body composition, because that lean body mass is kind of that real metric for gauging your protein needs.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:07:10]:
Let’s say the person is £100 and has low muscle mass. So what would be a lean muscle, A lean muscle mass in that person? Maybe 40, 45. So then presumably they’re going to need 80. 80 grams at least. I mean, I’m just kind of ballparking here. Maybe you can help out with some of the math.

Matt McGarvey [01:07:35]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, if they’re what I mean, yeah, 100 pounds, 100 pound per individual. Maybe they have like 50 pounds of lean, lean body mass. So that’d be 50 grams of protein. So that would be kind of a baseline. But if we’re trying to build muscle, then that definitely needs to be probably closer to those like overfeeding studies I kind of mentioned earlier where it’s 1 gram of protein per pound of just weight, just your body weight on the scale, not necessarily lean body mass, because of that protein’s anabolic effect with stimulating muscle protein synthesis. So I would say in the context of underweight trying to gain weight, you’d want to aim for that closer to probably 1 gram per pound of body mass versus the lean body mass.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:18]:
Okay, so a hundred grams. Yeah. I found the protein number much easier to achieve when I realized cottage cheese protein powders, et cetera, could help me get to that number. Am I correct in that thinking?

Matt McGarvey [01:08:30]:
Yes. Per unique dietary circumstances, should a person.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:08:37]:
Detox their liver before a weight loss program? Oh, and then more about protein. So what proteins are you recommending? Food, drinks, snacks, et cetera.

Matt McGarvey [01:08:48]:
Animal protein, meat. Meat is the go to. I definitely advocate for people eating red meat. Hopefully most of our patients have heard you and I talk about that enough to know that it’s okay. And then people that maybe aren’t our patients hopefully have heard of Rob Wolf and Diana Rogers and Sacred Cow and kind of some of that movement with, with like everything that’s kind of come from the paleo movement. Red meat is okay. It’s perfectly fine to eat. I, I encourage people to eat red meat. So animal based protein. Red meat’s great. You know, chicken’s cool quality. I’d say matters heavily as we get farther away from beef. I mean, grass fed, grass finish is still better than conventional, but I would argue conventional beef is better than conventional poultry. I know all, I know all of our Oceans are contaminated. So even though I love to recommend wild caught salmon, I know that’s not always ideal from a mercury contamination perspective.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:09:42]:
You have to limit that, unfortunately. I mean, it’s still decent, but you just don’t want to do that every day. So being a pescatarian is a potential problem from environmental, toxic and exposure perspective.

Matt McGarvey [01:09:58]:
Yeah, yeah. And then if you to. Once again, I know asterisk, if you tolerate dairy, cottage cheese can be great. Greek yogurt is wonderful. You’re also getting probiot from that, so that’s great. Once again, dairy toleration accounted for just with like kind of the, you know, people becoming more aware of just like celiacs, these allergies, food sensitivities, things like that. I feel like there’s just a lot more products available that account for these, you know, unique circumstances. So there are protein bars and protein powders that can be leaned on and used supplementally even with, you know, some of these dietary restrictions or sensitivities that may be in place. I don’t know every single one off the top of my head. But that is something where social media is actually a nice tool. Can be beneficial as you can likely come across things that fit your needs better than, you know, you ever thought was possible.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:10:53]:
Yeah. Or just go to your local health food store and stand in the protein bar aisle and take a look around. I mean, I found aloha bars. They were amazing. Right. So, you know, some people have nut allergies, some people have coconut, almond, cashew, you know, pea way. You have to just find what works for you. And then I think the beginning part of that question was really, should we detox our livers before a weight loss program?

Matt McGarvey [01:11:29]:
Maybe, you know, if I think doing, you know, there’s obviously like a very spectrum of labs at the Kingdom, but if we’re, I think if someone like has like a metabolic panel and we have their ast, alt, maybe a GGT and there’s some elevation there or some other concerns, then, you know, maybe we do a little bit more in depth, lot of work and talk about, you know, glutathione, maybe some PC.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:11:56]:
Which is hospital choline, so body biopc. You know, I also think that you could detox your liver while you’re starting the weight loss program. And the thing that I would suggest probably at the very beginning is to make sure that you’re pooping. Right. Because if you’re not getting rid of the, the stool, you’re not getting rid of the toxicants. And so making sure that that’s like number one in detox is making sure that you’re getting the stool out. So you may not need to do a liver cleanse or a liver detox, but you got to make sure that you’re going every day. And with the side effects of the GLP1s being often constipation and sluggish, sluggish peristalsis, you have to be extra careful that you’re ramping up your magnesium and making that you’re pooping on a regular basis. Let’s see. Rhonda asked, you mentioned 20 to 30 grams of protein to stimulate muscle, but how much of that should be heme iron?

Matt McGarvey [01:13:06]:
Um, I mean, if you’re, if you’re getting, I don’t know, like how much red meat is necessary to like the volume of red meat needed to achieve like the adequate daily intake of heme iron. But I feel like if you’re, you know, at least one to two servings of red meat, at least like one, a, one a day or one every other day is probably getting you pretty close. And then if you’re getting some, maybe if you’re taking, you know, some minerals or a mo, you know, like a multi mineral or like a really high quality multivitamin that does have iron, you’re going to get some from there.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:42]:
And then you have to be careful about iron too. Right. So.

Matt McGarvey [01:13:45]:
Yeah, because that can slow, slow transit down as well.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:13:48]:
Slows transit down and it can be very inflammatory. So unless you know that you are iron deficient and you really need iron, Iron can be pro inflammatory. Postmenopausal women often don’t need iron. If people have hemochromatosis or an iron overload situation. You want to be careful with iron. Let’s see, what about oxalates and collagen? Sally Norton has written about oxalates. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say we, and we can move on. If, you know, collagen bothers you because of oxalate issues or histamine issues or salicylate issues, you don’t have to eat it. That’s okay. You just find another protein source. There are plenty of other protein sources. And then Tria asked if you add tryptophan supplement with the collagen, will that create a complete protein? I think you need more than just tryptophan, but I’d have to double check that. So I’m not quite sure.

Matt McGarvey [01:14:50]:
Yeah, I think it’s probably more. I would, I would wager it’s probably a few more amino acids than just that one.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:14:56]:
Yeah. Here’s a good one. How does postmenopause impact this? Weight doesn’t drop. Muscles don’t build like when you were younger, when it was pretty easy.

Matt McGarvey [01:15:08]:
True. And being a male, I can’t speak to that with from personal experience, but working with patients population that has been impacted that by that profoundly, it can definitely be more of a challenge. And that’s where, you know, working with a functional practitioner, whether it’s us or someone else, and you know, having an honest conversation if something like HRT would be a good option for you, you know, with obviously it can take into account your whole health history, family history, things like that. But that’s something where, you know, a baseline restoration of quality of life can definitely be very synergistic with these goals. It’s not impossible when without it, but definitely very complimentary when hormones are accounted for and optimized.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:15:49]:
Yeah. And you know, again, I’ll kind of speak from my own perspective. I felt like menopause had caused a little bit of weight gain and wanted to do an experiment with the tir appatide and definitely felt like I was able to lose that, you know, eight pounds that, that I had kind of gained through sitting too much and Covid and menopause, which all kind of happened at the same time and then have been able to maintain that. So yes, I think hormone optimization and you know, using it as, as a, as a tool, like many other tools. Let’s see. What about compounded glp? I recently heard about a naturopath prescribing cycling on and off microd sources of compounded GLP on our Mark Hyman podcast.

Matt McGarvey [01:16:46]:
Yeah, I think we mainly use compounded versions and I think the flex we kind of, you know, espouse the benefits of a compounded version. Not just from like a financial perspective because very few people are going to get it covered like the true Geo, like the Ozempics and Mandragos of the world are going to get covered via their insurance and all that. So the compounded versions are ultimately more cost effective. They’re still just, they’re still very safe. And yeah, the latitude and flexibility of dosing and really personalizing it to the patient, whether it’s you need more, we need to do a half step, we need to cut it down, we need to do a microdosing protocol. I don’t know about the cycling on and off per se of that. I think the goal is to. They shouldn’t be forever drugs. I know that’s kind of also a recent Critique and criticism I’ve heard about, which circles back to the whole. If you don’t have your. You’re. If you’re not using it as a tool to optimize those lifestyle components in the first place, then yeah, you ought to be on it forever. But hopefully, you know, arbitrary range of time, six to nine months, we achieve your goal, taper off it efficiently, and then we’re steady state and everything’s honky dory moving forward.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:17:59]:
Right, because all of those dietary changes in lifestyle changes in weight training changes have been implemented and now you’re. That’s a. That’s a habit.

Matt McGarvey [01:18:09]:
It.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:18:10]:
So what if you stop the GLP1, the weight comes back and you restart the GLP1, but this time it doesn’t work?

Matt McGarvey [01:18:20]:
That’s a great. That’s a really good question. Would once again kind of want to know, like, lifestyle exercise, were those like, as dialed in and optimized as they could be? Um, and then if you restarted back on the same one, it. Could it be that maybe you were on the max dose, you went back to the max dose and there was still like a little bit of like that receptor attenuation, kind of like, like just the physiological response to the dose wasn’t happening, just kind of due to like, maybe some oversaturations. So that could be where trying one of the different peptides, like if that was on the semaglutide switch thing to the tirzepatide, or even, you know, we could stick with the semaglutide and maybe that’s where a microdosing protocol would be more of an option for that individual.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:00]:
Or look at the root causes. Right. So what are the reasons that you plateaued in the first place? What are the reasons that you gained weight in the first place? Is it mold? Is it sleep apnea? Is it another environment toxic and exposure? Things like that. So this person asks about injecting the peptides causing side effects. But if you. So this woman’s person says, I had a friend that said she felt more nauseated when she injected her stomach region compared to the thighs. Any thoughts on that?

Matt McGarvey [01:19:37]:
I have not heard that. I know most of my patients typically do their injections kind of belly periumbilical area, but I have not heard definitively if that matters in the context of side effects.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:19:54]:
Yeah, I hadn’t heard that either, but if it works, great, that’s awesome. You can also lower the dose, can you. Roberta asks, can you clarify, do all patients need to detox as they lose weight or do you Test patients for toxic load and then use detox protocols before you start them on the DLP agonists.

Matt McGarvey [01:20:16]:
Yeah, so I think I’ve learned this from working with Dr. McCann for the past four years is, I mean we’re all toxic. There’s the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. It sounds so end of the world apocalyptic saying it that way. But obviously we, and we educate about, you know, sourcing water filters, air, air purifiers, all the things. But even then, with all the best intentions and actionable items you can place like you’re just, you’re still going to be exposed, unfortunately. So everyone likely needs to be doing some form of it even, even without losing weight. It’s probably a good idea to have some detoxification based practices. You know, accessible saunas, making sure you’re sweating, you know, taking glutathione, taking glutathione, taking PC, hydrogen water, lemon water, eating.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:09]:
Lots of green leafy vegetables, pooping, pooping, pooping.

Matt McGarvey [01:21:16]:
So in some way, shape or form, it’s just, yeah, the intensity and extent of it can matter. And there is beautiful testing that, that functional medicine practitioners like us can run organic acid profiles. There are environmental toxicant panels, mycotoxin panels, that can tell us to what extent we need to be concerned about that and then can also help us kind of maybe even tailor that detoxification to a more personal level. Even though the global recommendations are still going to be extremely beneficial.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:21:55]:
The environmental toxic panels that are available do not include a lot of fat soluble toxins. So we are not really able to look at things like DDT or pcbs or flame retardants. The environmental toxic panels that are available will look more at non persistent things, but things that are ubiquitous like phthalates, which makes plastic soft, bisphenols, which make plastic hard, different kinds of pesticides, glyphosate. And so you can get an idea of how healthy is your lifestyle through some of these tests and then hopefully clean up your personal care products, clean up your home cleaning products and optimize your metabolism and your mitochondria using organic acid testing. We don’t necessarily do that with everyone, although we do do. We do have patients start out with what’s called a metabolomics test where we’re looking at their nutritional markers. And this is a elaborate organic acid test. It does look at some toxicant markers, including toxic metals. So we have some sense as to what additional things they might need to pay attention to. But that’s, that goes for Almost every patient is that we’re all toxic, as Matt said, and we. We need to have a lifestyle that’s going to support ongoing detoxification. Let’s see. Will the inbody scan tell you where your visceral fat is?

Matt McGarvey [01:23:32]:
Yes, in the sense that visceral fat is that abdominal area. So basically, like, you know, rib, rib cage to pelvis, that kind of. That bowl is where pretty much all your visceral fat will be anyway. So it’s kind of there and then it provides that quantification. I think there’s some very advanced, like if you want to do a full body MRI or something like that, or maybe it’s like a full body ct, they can like, like map it out for you, but save yourself the radiation exposure.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:23:58]:
Yes, I agree. Paula shared that there’s something called a REMS ultrasound for osteoporosis, which does a body scan with ultrasound and gives you your body composition and calorie intake.

Matt McGarvey [01:24:10]:
Cool.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:24:10]:
Thank you for that, Paula.

Matt McGarvey [01:24:12]:
Cool. Good to know.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:24:13]:
Roberta wanted to know the dosage of berberine and Akkermansia.

Matt McGarvey [01:24:18]:
Typical berberine, from the metabolic perspective. Like a berberine, the hydrochloride is usually 500 milligrams anywhere from one to three times daily, depending on how much of the effect we’re trying to achieve from it. I know that a straw. I don’t know if it’s an extract of that, but a dihydroberberine is a more potent form of berberine hydrochloride that’s available. And I think it’s 100 milligrams for that, so it’s more potent, so you need less of it. And I think the dosing protocol, like one to three times daily is still applicable. And to be perfectly fair, I do not know the dosing of the Akkermansia, whatever one capsule of the main brand is, but Dr. McCann probably has one right there to be able to tell us.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:25:02]:
Yeah, I have. Let’s see. So there are a couple different companies that make it. This particular one from the akkermansia company is 30 billion one. One capsule A this company, pendulum. I don’t have any affiliation with them. They also make a GLP1 probiotic that has the Akkermansia in it, as well as a Clostridia butyricum and some Bifidobacter infantis. This one is only 50 million blend. And then it has some chicory, which would be of fiber. And then the. The Pendulum company has a straight akromansia. So usually it’s just one Capsule a day, whatever. Whatever your product you’re looking at. Let’s see. And then really ask some questions that we’ve kind of been talking about already, but heard once that you start on the GLP ones, you have to stay on it for life or we’ll gain all the weight back. I wouldn’t want to say on anything long term is risky guidance, et cetera.

Matt McGarvey [01:26:20]:
Yeah, the goal is not for them to be forever medications. It’s a fair criticism from the people on the outside looking in, based off of, like, the literature that’s been published and that just once again boils down to not optimizing lifestyle. If that window of opportunity concept is. Is how we frame this to really get that lifestyle dialed in to lose the weight and then prevent future weight gain, then we don’t need to be on them forever. Like we, we shouldn’t have to be. You know, the timeline to get to that goal. I said, I don’t know, hopefully six to nine months, but obviously that could be shorter, it could be longer. Everyone’s circumstances will be unique to them, and that’s what we’re here for, is to personalize it to. You really live in that gray area. Um, but yeah, I don’t want you to be on it forever. Um, I want you to, you know, not have to stab yourself with a. Even though it’s a tiny, little thin insulin needle, like it’s not a big deal. I don’t want you have to do that every week for more than multiple months on end. Realistically.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:27:17]:
What strategies can help with the effects of the toxicants in the body during weight loss? So maybe let’s run through the list of some of the most useful things that we share with our patients.

Matt McGarvey [01:27:27]:
Yeah, sweating. So sauna, sauna is wonderful if you have access to one, but just sweating from exercise. And then I learned this from you. Glycerin soap. Making sure you get that off of you once you’re done sweating, pooping. So, you know, one bowel movement a day, hopefully more. Um, and a key component of that that’s often missed is just staying hydrated, you know, drinking plenty of water. Half. Half your body weight in ounces of water a day is a pretty good metric. And then if you’re exercising, definitely gonna want more to, you know, help keep yourself hydrated. Can’t mention hydration without mentioning electrolytes. Sodium is extremely important for maintaining insulin sensitivity, but also for kind of helping your body hold onto fluid, especially in the context of like a high protein diet. Diet probably lower carbohydrate diet where you’re not promoting as much of that retention from glycogen storage. So do, do, do those couple things.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:28:22]:
I, I’d also say lemon water or lime water. So adding lemon or lime to your water can cause the body to be more alkaline, which enables the body to be more successful at releasing environmental toxicants. You can also do that with carbonated mineral water. Obviously, I would recommend the carbonated mineral waters that are in glass, not cans. Right. Because we want to avoid the bisphenols that are usually lining the cans. Lots of greens. So all of your cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, as well as garlic and onions, if you can tolerate that. And then the charred kale, many of those cilantro, many of those have alkalinizing properties. They also support some of the liver detox things like glutathione. We’ve said this again, again, glutathione, phosphatidylcholine, supporting glucuronidation, your amino acids sauna. And then one of my personal favorites that is amazing for detoxification, which is a little bit hard for many people to hear. I usually don’t talk about it on the first date is coffee enemas or colonics, because that gets the toxicants out. So, so very briefly, we talked about fat cells and the toxins getting out of the fat cells. They go to the liver, they collect in the gallbladder, they dump in the gallbladder into the gastrointestinal tract along with the bile. But bile is expensive for the body to make. And so the body wants to maintain as much of that bile and recirculate it to use it again for your next meal. So, so it’s, there’s something called the enterohepatic recirculation. So you’re going to pull that bile back into the body, but guess what? You pull those toxicants back into the body. So in order to overcome that, we want to get more of the bile and all the toxins that are in the bile by doing things like coffee enemas or colonics. And so you get a bigger bile dump by having either the water stretch the colon wall or the stimulus of a couple of chemicals in the coffee go up into the liver, stimulate the gallbladder to dump bile, and then you get a bigger load of your environmental chemicals out, and then you can use binders to grab those chemicals in the gastrointestinal tract. So there it is. Okay. I think we’re Kind of at time. I don’t know if you want to take a little gander at the, the, the questions Matt, and see if there’s one or two more questions you want to answer and then we gotta, gotta run.

Matt McGarvey [01:31:32]:
Yeah. So let’s see here. Got about that. Prebiotics with probiotics. I mean. Yeah, I, I, I do. I don’t know, maybe Dr. McKin could speak this a little bit. I feel like prebiotics are a little bit of a gimmick. If you’re eating, getting a decent amount of vegetables in your diet, you’re probably getting that prebiotic fiber that’s coming from the veggies. So, so but if there’s a lot of like sensitivities or issues that maybe are limiting the intake of that, maybe that’s when they would be beneficial to take.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:32:01]:
Yeah, there was a product that Body Bio had called Gut plus which was a prebiotic, postbiotic fantastic product. Hopefully they will be bringing it back sometime later in 2025. So we’ll be on the lookout for that as a prebiotic. Not everybody needs a prebiotic. However.

Matt McGarvey [01:32:23]:
Calming sugar cravings, I mean that’s very multifactorial. I would say lowest hanging fruit would be protein intake, just that satiety, the macronutrient satiety, the protein just digestive component and also just the micronutrients. Because a lot of the, that’s rooted in if we’re not getting enough protein, our body is, we want more, we’re, we’re, we’re seeking it out. It’s the protein leverage hypothesis. Um, I forgot that the Australian researchers that came up with that term. But the idea behind that is we will continue to eat until we satisfy our daily protein goal. Um, the problem is, is that we have extremely easy access to energy dense foods. Basically foods that are really high in fat, really high in carbohydrates, not a lot of protein. So it’s really to over easy those foods and we’re not getting enough protein. And that’s why you can eat like you know, a bag of chips and be hungry an hour later even though you may have gotten a thousand calories in one sitting. But if you got a, which would be extremely hard to do but if you’ve got a thousand calories from just like a steak, like you’re not even going to probably be able to eat a thousand calories from a steak in a single sitting. So that’d be my kind of go to for calming sugar cravings, is just.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:33:27]:
Protein, protein, protein and then get checked out for possible candida overgrowth or fungal issues because that tends to drive sugar cravings too. And sugar cravings beget more sugar cravings. So if you are willing to bite the bullet and do cold turkey and detox yourself from sugar, which can be very painful, that can also help as well. There’s one question about soy. Soy is a PC causing issues for Hashimoto. As I want to say, there is no soy protein in the body biopc. It is just lipids and so should not cause any issues with Hashimoto’s. In fact, we use body BioPC for autoimmune conditions, including Hashimoto’s, on a regular basis. So thank you so much, Matt, and thank you to all of our participants. We will be sending out a replay next week with the transcript as well as the video. When we’re able to do that, usually in the beginning of the week is when it comes out. Any last words that you want to share with our listeners, Matt?

Matt McGarvey [01:34:54]:
Yeah, I think our program is really unique. So if weight loss really is a goal of yours, I think working with us would really be most optimal for you. Like I said, we’re really taking the I know that holistic word has really gotten a beating recently, but it’s a holistic approach. We’re taking all of into account the detoxification component, optimizing your nutrition, you know, really advising you on what that really actually looks like based on the inbody component, really being able to talk about the resistance training component. We do have a nutritionist that we can refer to. We have our own nurse in house that does our IVs to help with the detoxification protocol. Dr. McCanz, a renowned expert in environmental medicine and the detox that comes with that. So, so I think if you really want to do it the right way, make it sustainable and kind of be at a hopeful one and done approach to it, then I think we’re the place for that. And if anything you take from this protein, protein is king. Eat more protein. You’ll never go wrong with eating more protein.

Dr. Kelly McCann [01:36:00]:
Okay, thank you, Matt. Protein McGarvey. All right, everyone. So our next webinar will be January 24th with Dr. Dane Goodenow. He is a PhD researcher in the world of Alzheimer’s, cancer prevention and cardiovascular disease. He wrote this book called Breaking Alzheimer’s. He also talks about plasmalogen deficiency in the context of autism. So if you’re interested, please sign up. We would love to have you. It’ll be amazing conversation. Here is a brilliant researcher and an excellent teacher. And so I can’t wait to share that information with you. And again, thank you so much, Matt. Bye, everyone. Have a wonderful day.

Matt McGarvey [01:36:50]:
Thank you.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Dr. Neil Nathan on our most recent webinar to discuss highlights from his latest book, The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide. Dr. Nathan offered great insight into what sensitivity really means, what underlying causes are typically associated with highly sensitive patients, and the impact trauma plays in all of it. We also discussed why standard treatments often fail for sensitive patients and the need for tailored, gentle approaches to healing. I am so grateful to Dr. Nathan for bringing insight and hope into this incredibly important conversation. 

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:03):

Hi, and welcome everyone. I’m Dr. Kelly McCann, and this is our webinar series. And today I have my friend and mentor who likely needs no introduction, Dr. Neil Nathan. Hi, Dr. Nathan.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:00:19):

Hi Kelly. Good to see you as always.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:22):

Good to see you too. So thank you all for being here. A few housekeeping items if you have questions for Dr. Nathan. We will be chatting, hopefully going over a variety of things that you might be interested in. If you find that you have questions while we move on in our conversation, please throw them in the q and a. What I would love to see in the chat though is where you’re from and how you found out about this webinar series. And yeah, just tell us a little bit about yourselves. This will be our last webinar of the year. We’ll pick up again in January with a webinar I will be hosting with my longtime PA Matt McGarvey. We’re going to be talking about GLP agonists, the medications and different kinds of supplements, how to support healthy weight loss in the new year. And that will be really fun on January 10th, same time. And then for Dr. Nathan’s webinar, we will get the replay with the transcripts out to you sometime next week. So if you have to jump off and you can’t stay, that’s okay. The replay will be available. So we’re so happy to have you all here and I am wishing you all a happy holidays. But now let’s talk about sensitive patience and going from overwhelmed to feeling empowered. All right. Hi everyone.

(00:02:02):

So Dr. Nathan, what inspired you to write your book? The most recent book, the Sensitive Patience Guide.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:02:13):

Right. As with everything that I’ve written, it kind of comes as a flash from my muse. My muse helps me to write virtually everything that I’ve ever written. And I know you’re aware of this, Kelly, but it seemed to me that both patients and physicians didn’t really understand how complicated chronic illness is, and they didn’t really understand that the majority of people who have been sick for a while, be it mold toxicity or Lyme disease or many, many chronic conditions, will eventually develop some degree of limbic dysfunction, vagal nerve dysfunction, and mast cell activation. And I’ve been doing consultations for a very long time, and I just increasingly kept seeing folks who just weren’t making any progress, even though they were doing all of the right things for whatever that condition they were treating. It was as if there’s this impediment to healing. And we’ve slowly learned about those three major items, limbic, vagal and mass cell activation over the last 20 years.

(00:03:37):

It’s kind of crept up on us, but the importance became huge. And in addition to those three things, we’ve also learned about other things that make our patients very sensitive and really make it difficult for them to heal. Salicylate issues, oxalate issues, structural things in the body, particularly in the jaw and on and on and on. And so, I don’t know, it’s about this time of year, maybe two years ago that I thought there really should be a book about this. And so it’s like, okay, wise guy, well write one. But I didn’t want it to be my book. I wanted it to be a book of people who really are experts in the field so that when patients read it, it isn’t when, I don’t know, we’ve got this crazy doc who has all of these ideas. I wanted people to realize that this has a growing body of information and there were really people who were expert on it. And so I just tossed off an email to 20 of my favorite people, and fortunately I have some wonderful, wonderful friends, and I’ve just tossed it out, would you be willing to write a chapter in a book and you would write this to my shock? Virtually everybody said, oh yeah, so, oh boy, now I have to actually do this.

(00:05:07):

So one thing about writing with a group of people, it’s like herding cats. These are all professionals, busy have lots of things on their plate. So to get them to submit their chapters in some kind of a timely fashion was a little tricky, but we did it. And I really like what we put out. I’ve already gotten a ton of feedback on how helpful that has been. So it’s really for people who’ve become sensitive, overly sensitive people who used to be able to take their medicine and can’t now used to be able to take homeopathics or supplements. They can’t now because they become so sensitive. It’s to help them understand what happened to them. It’s not psychological, which some of their treating docs is telling them. It’s not psychological, it’s neurological cellular. And we do understand it, not completely but so much better that we can help almost everybody who has this, if they understood it. And if you understand what’s causing it, then you could also know how to treat it. So that’s a long-winded discussion of how it came about.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:06:21):

That’s fantastic. And it’s so needed in this space right now, because you’re right. I mean, patients over the past even 10 years have gotten more and more sensitive and less and less able to tolerate even the most usual of suspects, like things like probiotics with mast cell activation. Many patients can’t tolerate probiotics at all. So what exactly do you mean by sensitive? I know you’ve kind of explained the book, but maybe dive in a little bit more about that.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:07:00):

So for me, sensitive doesn’t mean does this outfit make my thighs look heavy? That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about emotional sensitivity, like, oh, that was a hurtful remark. I’m talking about neurological sensitivity. And that really boils down to the senses, which is smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight. So those senses have become sensitized, meaning someone who never had a problem before now has to wear sunglasses outside or maybe even in the house or people who used to handle rock music just fine. And now any sound that is louder than or more jarring than they’re used to, they just can’t tolerate it and sense of touch. They’ve become extremely sensitive. Smell has become very, very sensitive. And most of these people have true chemical sensitivity where their nervous system is being profoundly influenced in seconds by smelling something in the environment that their nervous system doesn’t think is safe for them. So increasingly also, I’m going to add to that list, EMF, sensitivity and food sensitivities. So we’re talking about essentially a nervous system that is its job is to protect you by scrutinizing the stimuli that you’re being exposed to in your environment and when your nervous system is going, I don’t think that’s safe. It is increasingly going to limit your exposures unfortunately, by giving you symptoms that are somewhat unpleasant.

(00:08:56):

So that’s sensitivity.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:09:00):

Why do you think the body chooses to have unpleasant symptoms as a mechanism?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:09:10):

It’s a warning system. It’s not trying to hurt you. It’s trying to wake you up to, Hey buddy, there’s something in your environment that I don’t think is safe and you really need to be aware of it. Not trying to hurt us. It’s trying to protect us by telling us that there’s a problem here. Unfortunately, that system becomes increasingly hypervigilant over time. And what I mean by that is it’s gotten more and more worried, if you can use that word. It’s not really true.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:09:45):

That trigger happy,

Neil Nathan, MD (00:09:47):

Trigger happy is a great word for it, that it’s, I don’t know if that’s safe for you. And the nervous systems, this is not psychological. The nervous systems capacity to feel safe, get slowly worse over time. And that’s typically what we do see. We’ll have a patient who maybe was treated for Lyme and able to take antibiotics a couple of years ago and now can’t even begin to take antibiotics. It just messes with them. And the two areas of the brain that are responsible for this, which is the limbic system and what we call the vagal nerve system, both will give different symptoms so that we’ll know, okay, that’s limbic and that’s vagal in origin. And to be more specific, the limbic system is basically looking at two main things, emotion and sensitivity. So anything in which you have had a change in your emotional makeup, meaning anxiety, depression, OCD, depersonalization, derealization, mood swings, anything that is increasing or new, that’s limbic virtually by definition. On the vagal side, the vagal nerve controls the autonomic nervous system. So a huge bunch of symptoms could come from that, like palpitations, temperature dysregulation. The vagus controls most of the intestinal system, so almost any GI symptom that you have. Constipation, diarrhea, reflux, gas, bloating, abdominal pain. Also this whole vagal system comes into play. So these two systems are really just trying to protect us, but they’ve become overprotective so that they are over analyzing the situation and telling you, no, you can’t do that. That might be dangerous. And it becomes more and more limiting.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:12:01):

Yes, more and more limiting. Okay. So what are some of the root causes that you’ve seen in your clinical practice that have perpetuated and exacerbated these levels of sensitivity?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:12:18):

Well, the two biggies in my world and yours are mold toxicity and Lyme disease with its co-infections, they are the biggies. EMF by itself is becoming increasingly a trigger by itself. And then there are some other infections that can do it less often. Mycoplasma infections and chlamydia infections, some viral infections will do that.

(00:12:44):

So it’s in the category of infections and toxins. So mold is probably the premier one, partly just because we can measure it accurately. There are tens of thousands of chemicals in our environment that can do it, but we can’t measure them, so we can’t make an intelligent comment about where that’s coming from. But it’s like a total load as we talk about in that field where the more and more chemicals accumulate in your body and that you’re exposed to, the more and more likely your body will finally go, I can’t deal with this. And it’s not trying to hurt us. When it feels that way, it’s trying to tell us we need to do something about it.

(00:13:29):

The more global way, this is a reflection of the toxicity of the world that we live in, the toxicity, both of the EMFs that we’re all exposed to, which is increasing dramatically and the increasing pudding of these chemicals into our environment. For a long time we used to say there were 80,000 chemicals in the environment that mostly we didn’t measure, but since in the last 50 years, there are 80,000 new chemicals in the environment, the vast majority, which have never been looked at from a safety point of view. And recently Lynn Patrick told me, no, we’ve way underestimated it’s closer to 350,000. Now, this isn’t to scare the listening audience, but just to make you aware that this increase in sensitivity isn’t just from mold and lime, but it’s also from the environment that we live in, which is becoming increasingly toxic, and it’s super important that the whole world wake up to this and really begin to protect us. I’m old and I’ve lived a fabulous life, but I do have kids and grandkids and I want them to grow up in a healthier world than they do. So we can’t put our head in the sand on this and go, yep, that’s terrible. I hope somebody does something about it. It’s up to all of us to be more conscious and put more pressure on our politicians who are generally much more prone these days to having their friends make money by polluting the world even more. We really have to put a stop to it.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:15:18):

Yeah, we really do.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:15:20):

I’ll get off the soapbox.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:15:22):

No, it’s a good soapbox. My take on it is that with all of the onslaught of chemicals mostly, which are unseen in our air, our water, our food, they accumulate slowly in the bucket. And then oftentimes people will get a hit, so they’ll have a water intrusion, water damage in a home, the mold growth will start and then bam, they’re over the top or they may get bit by a tick or scratched by a cat. And then because of this slowly, steadily increasing environmental toxicant burden, they can’t handle that one thing that tips them over the edge and puts them into hypersensitive mode.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:16:13):

I completely agree, and I would add covid to that because covid for millions, billions of people was a powerful cytokine blast into the body that overloaded the system in a way it never had been overloaded before.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:16:33):

Yes, that’s very true. It’s interesting. When I got covid the one time I did get sick, I was very sick in bed for three or four days, I went and got a rife treatment with my local practitioner who does rife, and that was a frequency treatment. For those of you who are not familiar with rife off the table, I was 80% better, but my brain did not come back online like I had expected because of the oxidative stress of covid. It was so massive. And what ended up happening was that I did this test called a prodrome scan looking at my plasmalogen levels, my plasmalogen levels were in the toilet. And so once I started replenishing the plasmalogens, my brain came back online. So I’m taking my body bio pc, I’m taking my prodrome plasmalogens there, you can see it there kind of.

(00:17:36):

And my brain came back online and what I learned was that the plasmalogens act as antioxidants in the body, and so they get sacrificed by the body if the oxidative stress is too big for the body to handle, and then you get this decline in your plasmalogens levels, which are also really important for myelin and for the release of neurotransmitters, particularly acetylcholine in the brain. So you literally can’t make connections if you don’t have enough. So it was a fascinating experiment, and it just so happens that end of January we’ll be having Dr. Dayan Goodenowe. Now talk about plasmalogens on my webinar. So Neil, you’re welcome to join us if you want.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:18:29):

He has a lot to say. I wouldn’t want to. I’ve heard him speak, and I think that that’s adding another piece to our treatments.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:18:42):

Yeah, it’s pretty exciting stuff. But I think this concept of all of these things, mold, Lyme, Bartonella, all these environmental toxicants, EMF, they are damaging the body triggering cell danger response causing oxidative damage and inflammation. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about the cell danger response and how that ties into these toxins that people are exposed to.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:19:13):

Before I launch on that complexity, I want to emphasize that one of the beautiful things in Kelly’s story is that she found ways to successfully treat herself. And so I don’t want all of you to take all of this as a negative, not in my mind. These are all how the body is struggling right now, but I hope you leave this discussion eventually with the idea that every single thing we’re talking about is treatable. Okay? I just really want that to be the take home message. Not am I messed up, but we’re all messed up, sorry, whatever. We’re all messed in. Whatever way we are,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:20:00):

Newsflash, we’re all messed up, we’re

Neil Nathan, MD (00:20:01):

All messed up. Some people admit it and some people don’t. But that’s another story. But that all of these systems can be brought back online. All of these systems, we can treat mass cell activation, we can treat limbic and vagal dysfunction. We can treat EMFs in the sense that we can block them and actually even treat it to a certain extent. So because you are sensitive, my main take home message is if you now understand what’s causing it, now you’ll understand that we have treatments for it. So you don’t have to keep being sensitive. So I just wanted to emphasize that before I jump into the next piece.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:20:48):

And I would also add to that we think about hypersensitivity as a negative. I’m sick, I’m hypersensitive. Well, in actuality that sensitivity is your superpower, right? It is your internal guidance system, your intuition giving you feedback. That is profoundly helpful feedback. And perhaps if we could reframe the way that we see our symptoms and reframe the way that we see our entire health journey, it would be a lot more enjoyable of an experience to say, how is it that I can use my symptoms to get to the place where I am making those healthy choices for myself in all of the circumstances of our lives?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:21:47):

And if I want to go off the beaten path a little bit more for a large percentage of my patients, their illness, whatever it is, and however it manifests, is a little bit of a wake up call on a being level to look at your life. Are you living the life you were meant to do? Are the things you’re doing giving you meaning and purpose? Is this really what you want to be doing right now? So those of my patients who have completed the journey have usually found somewhere maybe towards the end of it, this kind of aha moment of I would not have wished mold toxicity, lyme, bartonella, whatever it is on anybody, but many of them have come out the other end with I’m so much more in tune with my body and I’m so much more aware of who I am and what I need to do. And the choices that I’m making are so much clearer to me that again, I wouldn’t have wished it on me, but there is a very definite positive outcome to this.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:23:01):

I completely agree. I think about it in terms of when patients get a cancer diagnosis versus patients who experience chronic illness. When patients get a cancer diagnosis, it’s a smack in the face. Hey, wake up, the alarm bells go off. Everybody is afraid of the big C word. And oftentimes it spurs people to action. What is it that I need to change about my life? How is it that I need to change the environment in which the cancer grew in the first place? Is it that I need to clean up my diet or get rid of a toxic relationship or start making healthier lifestyle choices for myself, get good sleep, whatever it is, and the people who do that who answer the call get better, but because chronic illness is the slow decline, we don’t have that incentive. We don’t have that smack in the face like, Ooh, this is not what I want. And I wonder if there’s a way to, again, reframe the way that we think about chronic illness like we’re talking about that could really lead people to making those profound as assessments of what is the meaning and purpose of my life and how is it that I want my life to be, and who am I on this planet and what is my purpose?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:24:35):

I’m in complete agreement, but from a clinical perspective, having done this for a couple of decades, I find that people aren’t ready for that discussion until they are better

Kelly McCann, MD (00:24:51):

Or somewhat better.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:24:54):

Well, that’s kind of what I meant somewhat better, where they’re on the road to healing where it isn’t just an empty promise that, I mean, for many of our patients, they’ve seen many, many physicians before they ever get to our office and it hasn’t worked. That’s why they’re in our office because it hasn’t worked, right? They don’t really need empty promises about, oh, I can help you and I can do this, and I can do that. They need to actually feel better before they’ll really begin to embrace more that’s on their table. So I think of it as a kind of a evolving process. In my own practice over the years, I’d get to a certain point where people were much better, and these were people who were either bedridden or couldn’t work anymore. They were on disability, could barely function, and now they were so much more functional.

(00:25:53):

And before we were even done with treatment, I began to raise a question. I go, okay, this has consumed you and your family for years. So when you get well, how are you going to visualize your life? What are you going to be doing now that you haven’t been able to do any of it for a while? You almost have to prepare them psychologically and spiritually and mentally for the transition of going from really sick constantly to being well and able to do whatever you want to do. That’s a very hard transition. And so at some point on an intuitive basis, I would look at my patient and go, okay, I think we’re ready to have this discussion. And I usually start with what gives your life meaning and purpose, and then we go from there. But I think it’s an evolving process. I don’t think that people are ready to even hear that until they’re better enough that they can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:27:00):

I agree. That’s been my experience. Also, I would love to figure out a key somewhere earlier on in the process, but that’s been my experience too.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:27:19):

I don’t know how to do that, but I trust my intuition. My intuition will tell me this is the time. And I don’t know if it’s perfectly spot on, but it tends to be pretty good where if I engage someone in that discussion, they get engaged. As opposed to maybe in earlier times of my practice, before I knew what I know, I would watch people retreat from that discussion. I’d literally watch them start putting up walls and defensively. And so it became key to me to not introduce it until I had some degree of intuitive certainty that this was going to be able to be received.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:28:09):

I agree. I do agree.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:28:11):

Yeah. We’re kind of boring together. Audience, Kelly and I have a really bad habit of agreeing with each other about much of this,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:28:19):

Right? That’s why we love our conversations, but it might be boring for other people. So talk us through the cell danger response.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:28:29):

Okay, back to the cell danger response. The cell danger response is the brain child of Bob Naviaux, who is a physician at CSD. And it is a brilliant understanding of the underpinning biochemically of almost all chronic illness. And the key to the cell danger response is that when the cell on a cellular level, when it feels threatened, it feels threat very specifically. It’s not like on a cellular level, it’s like, Ooh, I think I should be afraid. It’s very specifically the mitochondria are the organelles inside the cell which perceive threat by a drop in electrical voltage within the cell. And there are three things that will trigger this, toxins, infections, and stress. And once the cell goes into this cell danger response, let’s take a virus as something that might trigger it. The cell goes into this dance, if you will, orchestrated dance old of how am I going to deal with this virus?

(00:29:45):

And so a whole bunch of biochemical shifts occur within the cell to do that. For example, viruses require our body’s methylation in order to reproduce. So in order to stop the virus from hijacking our methylation chemistry, we’ll shut it down. So virtually everyone we see with a chronic illness is not methylating properly. So sometimes I get a little frustrated when someone refers someone to me and say, oh, their problem is that they can’t methylate properly. My response is kind of duh. And the same is true of I hear the diagnosis mitochondrial dysfunction. I’ll have a patient who goes to a major medical center and they’ll get a week of testing and come back with my diagnosis is mitochondrial dysfunction. It’s like, no, that’s not your diagnosis. That happened. That started happening. The second that cell was exposed to a threat, the mitochondria start to change their structure, shape and chemistry to deal with the threat.

(00:30:54):

They actually make a substance called extracellular ATP, where ATP, which is the energy molecule, and that’s what they make. We know that the mitochondria make our energy by making ATP, but when they are threatened, they take the ATP and move it extracellularly. And the extracellular A TP is a warning. Warning that goes throughout your whole body telling the body time to shut down. We have a threat on board, we’ve got to deal with it. It goes from a cellular process to a whole body process in which whole body shuts down. And a lot of what Dr. Naviaux has taught us is that we have to think about making the cell safe so that it can move on in the healing process into a different metabolism before it can actually heal. And so there’s an actual healing cycle that Dr. Naviaux has put together, and all of this is based on getting the mitochondria, which are the sensors for danger to go, okay, we’re good. We’re safe. You can’t just convince it. You can’t go, okay, mitochondria, we’re safe, we’re good. It’s like, I don’t think so. I still have an electrical voltage drop in me and you can’t talk me out of it until that changes I’ve got a whole body to take care of. So that is as simple an explanation of the very, very complicated process that I can give you.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:32:38):

Wonderful. That’s really helpful to envision those little mitochondria in those cells. So then do me a huge favor and link that then to the vagus and limbic and mast cells.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:32:53):

Well, they’re all very directly not only connected, but interconnected. So all of those systems work together to keep you safe. Now, the mast cell system is a cellular way of doing so, and the limbic and vagal are a neurological way of doing that so that the mast cells are sensing what’s coming into the body often by what you’re swallowing or smelling or eating. And on a neurological basis, all of the senses are engaged, and are we safe Now to help our audience understand it a little bit, the vagal and limbic systems have been evolving from the moment you are a fetus in your mother’s uterus, it doesn’t just pop up like I’m impaired. Now, none of us had a perfect childhood and the way we coped with whatever we coped to, and it could be mild, you may have had fabulous parents and terrific childhood, forgive me, but most of the people I know had some form of that, which went from fairly close to nowhere near that.

(00:34:14):

So if you as a child had a recurrent ear or throat infections or you needed surgery or you had parents who were either distant or controlling or actually abusive in any way, shape or form, that began your limbic system in looking at your little world and going, I don’t think you’re safe. I’ve got to be on alert here. And so depending on how your life evolved, your Olympic system has become more and more and more alert with all of the things that have happened to you over your life. And for some of us, we’ve lived blessed lives with minor hits, and for some people we have had tragedy galore and none of that’s your fault. All of that is about how your limbic system was trying to keep you safe in the first place. So when we start talking about limbic dysfunction, it’s important to know it didn’t start the day you felt more anxious or depressed.

(00:35:16):

Your body’s been working up to it for a long time, and you wanted to know about the interactions. There’s a direct connection between mast cells and the vagus nerve. I mean a direct neurological connection. And the vagus limbic systems are designed to work together. So it’s almost impossible to have a limbic dysfunction and not have a vagal dysfunction as well. It’s a package deal. So when we think about these three systems, all three usually need to be worked on concurrently because if all three are hypervigilant, let’s say, so you’ve got a hypervigilant, limbic, vagal mast cell system, and you’re doing a limbic retraining exercise and you’re calming down your limbic system, if you’re not working on your vagus and mast cells, you’re going to stay hypervigilant. So once you understand that, then you can understand the whole concept of treatment because it involves all of those things

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:24):

And all of those things ongoing until you are better

Neil Nathan, MD (00:36:28):

Ongoing until the threat is gone. So again, many of my patients will do some limbic retraining, Annie Hopper or Ashak Gupta or Primal Trust, and they’ll say, oh, I did it for a couple of months and it really helped. I said, that kind of implies you’re not doing it anymore. But yeah, I thought that’s all I did that do. So I try to say from the beginning when we started, you need to be doing these things until whatever the trigger is gone be that Lyme or mold or whatever. Once that’s gone, then you don’t have to do that anymore. But most of my patients have found that once they’ve started doing limbic retraining, they want to keep doing it forever because our limbic system is constantly being threatened. So it’s like, I’ve got this great tool, why should I give it up now? It doesn’t take that much time, and I can keep my whole system more serene at peace. I can deal with the stress much more

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:33):

Easily. One of the things that I found helpful for patients is to have them choose the aspects of the different programs or the devices that they are attracted to that work for them that resonate with them. It’s each individual’s program. Yes, you’re doing the Primal Trust, but in the end, it’s Sasha’s program or Emily’s program or Jody’s program or my program. It’s not this thing. Usually people don’t take every aspect of a individual program and use all of it all the time. So take the things that work and move on is probably one of the best ways to do it. And then you’re doing things concurrent. I think this was my big aha this weekend talking with you with a mutual patient that we have to do these things concurrent, the mast cell stabilization, the vagus nerve, the limbic system, until that threat, the mold is gone, the Lyme is gone, whatever it is, that’s probably the biggest take home for me and for each person to take those individual pieces that they really resonate with that work for them and craft their own program of getting better.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:39:05):

Absolutely. Once again, we’re in agreement. And even within the limbic retraining programs, there’s more and more of ’em all the time. Now, since the world has kind of figured out, this is kind of important, I’ll have patients who love DNRS and I’ll have patients who, that doesn’t resonate for me. I completely agree that adopt, use and do the system that you resonate to most. And I’m absolute in agreement. Most of our patients are cognitively impaired and they can’t in the beginning, create their own program. But as they get better and more in tune with their needs, then they can take a piece from one program and a piece from another program and a piece from another program and make it their own. Absolutely.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:39:59):

Right. Yes. Good point. Let’s talk a little bit about the trauma piece more in depth because I think that it needs more attention.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:40:16):

What kind of trauma?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:18):

Well, exactly, any kind of trauma, big T and little T trauma.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:40:28):

So there’s the trauma of emotional distress, which we kind of talked about in the limbic system. And then there’s the trauma of actual structural trauma to the body where the body’s been injured in a variety of ways, and sometimes the body has not completely healed from that, and that compromises the tissues of the body. So I don’t get too complicated, but the body holds its emotions in the muscles and myofascial tissue of the body. I don’t think that’s very well known. People think you hold our emotions in our head or in our brain. Well, we hold the memory of it there, but the actual emotion, if it still is held in our tissues so that it’s not uncommon for people who are acupuncturists or body workers to free up a very tight muscle and have the person have an emotional response to that. And even a memory that comes with, oh, I even remember when that happened to me. So for many of our patients, that’s another limiting piece to their healing that they often need to have Somebody who knows body work look at the structure to help them. One of the most important of those is the jaw.

(00:41:54):

I don’t think most people understand how the body prioritizes the teeth occluding properly. You’d think, okay, no big deal. It doesn’t occlude perfectly. Why would we care? Because the body freaks out when it isn’t occluding properly. Not sure why it’s such a priority, but it is. So some of the patients who I’ve worked with have had trouble even responding to limbic vagal and mast cell. If they have had a prolonged TMJ or they may have had some jaw surgery and the jaw is not aligned properly and until it gets aligned properly, that is the threat that their systems need to deal with first. I haven’t seen it a lot, but I’ve seen a couple of dozen cases where until we got the jaw aligned properly, the other things we were doing weren’t really going anywhere. So I just wanted to light that up. For consciousness purposes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:42:57):

How do we find appropriately trained dental practitioners who can help with dental alignment issues?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:43:08):

Very hard.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:43:10):

Yeah,

Neil Nathan, MD (00:43:10):

Very hard. One of the things that is often not appreciated or done is one of the tools that I have, I’ve been doing osteopathic cranial work for 40 years, and what I know is any dental procedure, even a cleaning, can mess up the structure of your head by simply prolonged opening of the jaw in that position. And so most dentists have no grasp of what opening the jaw and forget being out of position and being the TMJ is jammed on one side or not moving on one side. That’s even the worst place to come from. So that it should, in an ideal world, and there are not enough people to do this, after every dental thing you have, you should have an osteopath who’s cranial trained work on your hand, just get it back into alignment.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:44:07):

Sounds good.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:44:10):

But most dentists, there are exceptions. There are a handful of dentists who’ve taken the osteopathic training course and can help do that. So for example, and I’ve had lots of problems with this. I recently have, every dentist I’ve ever known, this tells me that I grind my teeth at night and I’ve kind of blown ’em off, but I cracked a couple of teeth this year and had to get crowns, and I thought it’s time I did something about it. So I had my dentist who I like very much, make me a special splint and it felt weird. And fortunately, I live in a community with two fabulous osteopaths, and what we simply do is they feel my head, I put the device that I’ve been given in and they feel my head again. They go, Ooh, you shut down when that goes in. So I need to find a dentist who’s capable of modifying that device.

(00:45:05):

So it is in tune with my body’s basic motions and not a more awful description of that is when I was in practice in Missouri, I had a number of kids who developed seizures after they had orthodontic appliances put in and braces and things like that, and I put my hands on their head and I could rebalance it to a certain extent, but after I’d rebalance it, they tighten it up some more and the seizures would get worse. And the fun point, I told them, I told the family, you got to get the braces out of there. It is causing your seizures. And of course if you ask the orthodontist, oh, ortho never, never causes seizures. What are you possibly talking about? We remove the devices and they’ve never had a seizure again. So there’s a consciousness even in the dental world that I do what I do to fix you and I’m not aware that everything in the body is totally interconnected to everything else.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:46:16):

Well, and I mean anatomically it makes sense. This is how we chew. This is how we communicate. This is how people, this is how we convey information visually through our facial expressions. If there’s a problem here, we are knocking out all sorts of vitally important functions of a human body. Yeah. The challenge is to figuring out how to get an osteopath and a dentist to work together to make that all work.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:46:53):

My go-to person is Tasha Turzo. Tasha wrote a book on it by the way, on this whole subject that the whole facial jaw structure is crucial to the healing process, and she has dentists all over the country that she works with to facilitate this process of getting the jaw back into alignment.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:21):

Fantastic. That’s really great. Hopefully Michelle can find her. How do you spell her last name?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:47:26):

T-U-R-Z-O. She’s a do and Tasha’s great. I’ve known Tasha for a very long time.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:37):

Fantastic. Let’s see. What are some of the nuggets of information that you want to share from the book? There are so many I know, but I’d love to hear some of your favorites. What were the big ahas as you were working with the other authors?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:48:00):

I’m sure you all know Scott Forsgren, who is dear friend, and Scott tends to put me on a show after I write a book, and I sent him a copy of this pre-publication copy so that he could read it before they interviewed me, and he immediately emails back. This is a big book. I wanted it to be comprehensive. I didn’t want it to be overwhelming, but I wanted it to include almost all of the pieces of the puzzle we currently know so that people would get a pretty much comprehensive view. So from a nugget point of view, the drivers of sensitivity or what we’ve been talking about, limbic, vagal, mast cell, and maybe EMF, there are others, and I encourage people to read the book and resonate to the chapters that you might connect to in the same way that we’ve been talking about resonating. Don’t have to read it in order chapter by chapter, go to the ones that call you. And there’s just a ton of information in there, which will be very helpful for a lot of people, but not everyone. So not everyone has oxalate issues and not everyone has to solicitate issues, but if you do and you’re not aware of it and not dealing with it, that will limit your healing. Yeah. So that’s my new baby.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:32):

That’s a new book. Lisa B, there it is. Dr. Nathan’s

Neil Nathan, MD (00:49:36):

Book, the Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide. I think another nugget that I intended people to take away is this is not in your head. These are physiological changes which have triggered this sensitivity and they’re all treatable. And I think that is the number one thing I’d like people to take away from that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:03):

Fantastic. Well, gosh, shall we take some questions? We have a few.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:50:11):

Okay. It’s fine with me.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:13):

Actually, you know what? Before we do that, do you want to say anything about Beth O’Hara?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:50:22):

Okay, we can both, gosh, Beth was our friend, colleague and was a shining star. I met her at a medical meeting that Bob Miller put on, and I heard her lecture and it was that, oh, we have a superstar here is an amazing being. Just hearing her lecture and talk. And I went up to her afterwards and we hit it off immediately and we did a research project immediately and we became friends, colleagues. Beth has helped tens of thousands of people, and I only hope she knows how amazing her life was. She came to the table with a ton of structural and emotional issues, grew up in a very difficult circumstances, many, many stressors, many difficult relationships, many episodes of abandonment and structurally jaw, for example, absolutely applied to Jeff Ti Beth. These things I’m talking about. She had had Lyme and mold and everything we’re talking about, and she had oxalate and salicylate issues, and those were her teachers.

(00:51:57):

So for the audience out there, Beth might be frustrated at times with how her body was functioning, but she was grateful. Those were the things that had pushed her to dig deeper and learn and study and put this complex stuff together. She was deeply empathic and very attuned to the natural world. She came up and spent some time with us when I lived in northern California, we took her to a grove of virgin redwood trees and she was in heaven. She just loved wandering around, just beautiful to watch how she just lit up in that environment. So her death is a tragedy and a travesty. We need death, and I hope she reincarnates quickly so that we can have more access to her beingness. But for those of you who learned from her and maybe work with her or knew her, she was a light.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:13):

Yes, she was. I’m not going to say anything because I’m going to get all choked up. So we’re going to move on to q and a, and for those of you who don’t know Beth or didn’t know her, she founded a company called Mast Cell 360, which still is in operation. She and her, she has left a legacy and a lot of resources there and there are practitioners who are continuing her work. Okay, so here we go. Let’s see. Is your book available on Audible, dr?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:03):

It will be next month.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:05):

Next month,

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:06):

Okay. It’s in production right now. I’m told it will be released in January.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:10):

Do you know who the reader is?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:13):

No.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:14):

Okay.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:16):

I’m working with on my last book, I picked the reader on this one. It’s a larger company and they didn’t give me a lot of choices.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:27):

Okay. So we’ll see. Hopefully they’ll have a lovely voice.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:32):

One hopes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:34):

Okay. Regarding controlling muscles that are under control, most naturopaths I’ve heard from tend to lean on medications more than natural means. Is that because of the research abundance for medications versus being less research on herbs and supplements? What’s the effectiveness of using different medications relative to the herbs?

Neil Nathan, MD (00:54:58):

Boy, I look at that differently. Again, we come down to the unique chemistry and genetics of all beings and everybody is different than what they respond to. So I have some patients who clearly prefer natural supplements. I have patients who clearly prefer and benefit from pharmaceuticals, and I have some people who do both, and I tend to use both personally, but there is a preference. I’ll lotus in some patients that for whatever reason, they can’t take quercetin or Perimine or many of the other supplements that I use and vice versa. I have other people who cannot handle a pharmaceutical but can only handle in a supplement or botanical form. So it’s just about finding for each being what it is that helps them the most and work with it. There’s no right or wrong to this, to my knowledge, and Kelly’s even more of an expert on mass cell activation than I am. So you want to

Kelly McCann, MD (00:56:07):

Sure. Everyone is different, and I think a lot of it can be personal preference. We don’t really know until we start trying things, how people are going to, patients can have mast cell activation, have very little response to antihistamines if histamine isn’t a big mediator in the mast cell degranulation that you have, but for a lot of people we do start with H one and H two blockers. I think that that’s in part because that’s what Dr. Lawrence Afrin does recommend that for many people you get a good solid relief with layering in the appropriate H one, H two blocker, and he will often suggest that you start with one and work through the whole list. Personally, I try and use some muscle testing to see if I can shorten the window of trial periods. It’s not perfect, but it can help patients sometimes dial in those medications and or supplements that are going to be helpful. So that’s how I tend to do it rather than try each one. There’s no one right method, there’s no one right supplement. Most people need multiple avenues to calm down those mast cells.

Neil Nathan, MD (00:57:42):

The same for me. Again, I started with Afrin’s protocol, so I typically will start with an H one and an H two blocker and quercetin as my, just to get a feel for what category are they responding to best. Let me make a couple of comments about sensitive patients and even ultra sensitive patients. When patients are really sensitive, and that’s mostly what I see, they may not be able to take the mast cell supplements until they’ve done adequate limbic and vagal retraining first maybe six to eight weeks of that first, then we can start on tiny doses of mast cell treatment. And for me, those doses that worked are easing them in number one, a tiny dose of Ketotifen 0.1 milligrams. Sometimes once in a while, I even use less than that, but starting with one at bedtime and then working up to one 30 minutes before each meal, and if they’re comfortable with that, then we can bump it up and increase it.

(00:58:51):

Another thing that I can take in tiny doses is chromo and sodium where you can take the ampule and open it up and take a bit of it first, again, 30 minutes before each meal. And for some people, neuro ProTech LP is a tiny dose of quercetin. So those are some of the lowest doses of mast cell things that I’m aware of. So I’ll try them on those things first and then I’ll build on it, and once the limbic and vagal stuff has kicked in, I can usually increase that and move it around and add more of those materials.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:59:30):

Yes. And other things that I’ll say about the commercially available products is that sometimes people do have problems with the inactive ingredients. We call them excipients. And so compounding is the way to go in those situations. And so with patients who are very sensitive but also cost conscious, I will scribe like a small dose compounded maybe five tablets, and oftentimes compounding pharmacies are willing to work with mast cell patients and just dispense a couple of tablets that they can try or capsules that they can try to cut down on the cost of trying them. And then once you find that something works, I think it is worth the cost. So there are workarounds, and then if you don’t want to do that, then we’re kind of left with opening capsules of supplements to try and avoid the inactive ingredients. Okay. The next one, Karen, you might have to clarify for me, where do genetic zero allele carried from both parents for detox and mold enzyme recognition or absent? How does that play into neurologic cause for sensitivity issues?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:01:01):

Okay, so first of all, I don’t think analyzing SNPs plays much of a role early on when people are really sick. Keep in mind that I think people misunderstand SNPs. It’s not an all or nothing thing. It’s like take M-T-H-F-R, which everyone jumps up and down about if you even have a Double N problem, you still are able to methylate to 40% not, and if you have another, maybe it’s 70%, but it doesn’t mean you don’t methylate. It means it’s not optimal. And my biggest problem with it is you don’t know if those genes are being expressed or not. You only know you have it. So I think a snip information is very helpful later on. But when I’ve had people treat elaborately by NP testing in the early phases of it, they’re often frustrated, take a bunch of supplements, they don’t do anything because in the cell danger response one, when you’re really shut down, you’re on survival mode, the body goes, those are nice supplements, but what do you want me to do with it?

(01:02:17):

I have a bigger fish to right now, can’t deal with it. So I have a great deal of respect for Bob Miller who does a lot of teaching in this. He’s great. He’s written a chapter in a couple of my books. I love Bob, but in our most sensitive ill patients, that information doesn’t come into play until later. So to be honest, I don’t even look at it in the early phases because it has no relevance to what my patient is doing. Most patients are able to detox to some extent, even if they are compromised. So a lot of people make, wow, I can’t detoxify, so I can’t do anything until I detoxify better. And I’ve watched those patients spend years supposedly getting their detox better where they’re not actually dealing with making them detox problem, which is the mold or the lime or the Bartonella. So you always have to go back to are you really treating the root cause and not get caught up in what I call downstream effects like methylation and mitochondrial dysfunction and you name it, that’s downstream deal with what’s really threatening that being and making it hard for them to heal.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:03:37):

Right, which is the mast cell, limbic system, vagus nerve. That’s where you’re going to gain traction and then go after those root causes, the mold, the Bartonella, the EMF, the environmental chemicals, et cetera. Okay. What program do you recommend for limbic vagal retraining for someone who has cognitive impairment from mold toxic illness?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:04:02):

Well, almost everybody with mold toxicity has cognitive impairment. So that’s not unique. Sorry, sweetie. That’s

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:10):

Everybody

Neil Nathan, MD (01:04:11):

Comes with the territory. The three main programs that I use are Annie Hopper’s, DNRS, Gupta’s, Amy Delivery Training Program, and Kathleen King’s Primal Trust. Primal Trust is a little more comprehensive. And to address the concept of cognitive impairment, my one problem with Ashock and Annie’s program is she insists that you have to do it for an hour a day in order to make progress. Absolutely not true. And it will set most of our patients back because if you try to do it, it’ll really hurt your brain. So with all of those programs, I really encourage my sensitive and cognitively impaired patients go easy, 10, 15 minutes once a day, it works. And just in confirmation, I ran into Annie at a medical meeting maybe six months ago, and she said reluctantly, I hate to admit it, but you’re right, a lot of my patients can’t do an hour a day. And so even Annie has come around to that as relevant. So if you’re cognitive impaired, just do a little bit of it and it is very doable and it will be helpful and work.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:05:34):

And I almost think that when she was sick and designing the program, people were more capable. She was more capable of doing it for longer periods of time. But because the world has become more toxic and our toxic burden has increased and our sense lack of safety has increased, we have more sensitive patients and therefore people have to go slower. They just can’t do it for that long a period of time.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:06:06):

I want to toss out that I love Annie and I love Ashra. They’re both friends, lovely people, and they’ve done fabulous work. There comes the, but some of their followers, not necessarily Ashok or Annie herself, have become what I call either DNRS zealots or amygdala zealots in which they have come to believe that all you have to do, if you get a coach from one of these people, all you have to do is limbic retraining. It’ll fix whatever it is you have wrong with you. I will admit, in rare cases I have seen limbic retraining really help heal people almost completely. And I can give you reasons for that, but that’s irrelevant. What I really want to communicate is please don’t get swept up in that. You have to fix what’s triggering it in the first place. And that is almost always mold in line. And that is it a terrific adjunct? Is it necessary to even get you going or launched or, I loved your word getting traction. That’s a beautiful language to do that with, but you have to get out the cause.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:07:19):

Yes, I agree. Oh, this is an interesting question from Tom. Thank you, Tom. Have either of you seen a correlation with low oxygenation and increased toxic load? Toxic load seems to equal increased sensitivity. Can low O2 be diagnostic? And I kind of have a follow-up if you have an answer for that idea.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:07:44):

Forgive me though phrase low oxygenation is I need to understand that better. Are we talking about having oxygen, a little oxygen saturation thing on your finger? And

Kelly McCann, MD (01:07:57):

That’s what I’m assuming he’s talking about.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:08:03):

I’m not sure quite how to answer that question other than to say the body does not like being without oxygen. Well,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:08:13):

Maybe I’ll throw out a case and then we could see

Neil Nathan, MD (01:08:16):

If, okay, that’d be great.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:08:17):

So I have a patient who lives at elevation, but normally her oxygenation has been normal. Most recently, however, though it’s been a lot lower, like 88, 85 ish in the daytime. So she’s wearing oxygen at night to sleep, and we did a urinary mold, I’m sorry, we did a urinary metals test, and she has very high levels of mercury, and I’m wondering if the mercury burden is compromising her oxygenation somehow.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:09:09):

Well keep in mind that a rise in heavy metals is part of the cell danger response intrinsically, that one of the key features of a cell danger response is when their body feels threatened, it begins to sequester heavy metals. And then that’s part of like if you will, any of the toxicities here. It shut downs our ability to excrete it. So as people get, well, if it’s not too high, you can just let it go and the body will excrete it eventually. But if it’s really high, then it probably needs to be treated earlier on. But as you’re talking, I was thinking of another possible example here, sleep apnea. In sleep apnea, you would have a situation in which the oxygen saturation drops, and it is clearly associated with a variety of medical sequelae that are negative, be it headaches, chronic fatigue, high breath pressure. So it would seem to me that low oxygen would affect reactive oxygen species in the body and have an effect in that context,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:10:22):

Right? Yes. Well, when you don’t have enough oxygen, you don’t get enough oxygen perfusion to the organs, you’re going to have organ damage. But that wouldn’t, I guess, in tying it into the toxic load, it’s not the way that most people present I and experience of toxic load. But it’s a good point to consider if somebody is presenting with low oxygen and you rule out mechanical issues, et cetera, to look at the toxic burden piece. Yes.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:11:07):

Early on in my career, I had a number of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome who when we identified sleep apnea and fixed it, it disappeared. So it’s just another piece to the complicated puzzle how our patients are.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:11:28):

Yes. Matt from Bolton. Hi Matt. He’s a friend of a former student of my dad’s. He’s asking a question, as a chef, what do you feel are the best natural sweeteners to use for low carb, no glucose cooking. I’ve been playing around with monk food. What do you think?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:11:51):

Stevia, monk fruit are my two favorites. I mean, that’s what I personally use. I don’t have a better answer than that, but I’ve been doing both of those for a long time.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:06):

Yeah, I like those two. Okay. When a patient is working on limbic and vagal system for retraining, are there other therapies that can be done at the same time, or do they need to be done first before starting anything else?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:12:24):

Good question. Some folks get really wrapped up in whatever it is they teach or do. So I’ve had some trainers in all the fields say, oh no, you can only do limbic retraining and don’t do anything else. Or I’ve had people doing certain kinds of biofeedback and say, well, you can’t do anything else. I completely disagree with that. From my perspective, the more things that people can do to quiet their limbic and vagal systems, the faster they heal and the faster they restore some semblance of safety in their body. So I ask people to do more if possible. Not only do one or only do the other. It seems to me that these systems somewhat interface with each other. And like in mast cell activation, for example, it’s very complicated. A thousand biochemical mediators released by mast cells. So you have to comment it from different angles in order to settle it down. A single agent often doesn’t do anything, but I think that limbic and vag gular training is in the same category. The more you are rebooting, literally your nervous system, the more effective it is. But that’s my experience.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:13:51):

Well, as usual, we agree. I really do agree. I mean, if there’s a conflict one therapist is saying versus another therapist. And that’s something that needs to be addressed of course. But usually people can do limbic retraining, they can see a somatic therapist, they can go to an acupuncturist, they can take all their mast cell stabilizing effects. And then of course, you’re looking at the root causes and addressing those root causes. It mean most of the patients who walk out of my office have 15 things to do. And yeah, we’re going to be here way too long doing one thing at a time. So we have to be able to have the bandwidth to do a couple different things, at least

Neil Nathan, MD (01:14:44):

To build on a comment Kelly made earlier. And notice which of those things you resonate to. So not only are we agreeing, but the more you do, the more you expose your system to, the more options your system has to respond to. And you can go, well, you know, I do that and I definitely feel better and great. Keep doing it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:15:11):

Exactly. Alright, this is multifactorial. Lori said she’s sick due to EMF hypersensitivity. It occurs everywhere. Her house, her car, any store being outside, she can feel the strength of the waves at different times of the day and night causes massive headaches, GI issues, heart palpitations, neuropathy, has seen several specialists, but no one knows what to do. Recently saw a neurologist at Nova Southwestern. She lived in a moldy house, which was a new construction house followed by the covid vaccine times two, and everything started. She’s tested positive for EBV herpes, Lyme and a large amount of spike protein, although she’s never had covid Ben detoxing for years. And the EMF is getting worse. Any ideas?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:16:08):

Sure. This is my typical patient and yours. So just to think it through, number one, we want to identify what are the root causes here. We have mold clearly involved. We may have Lyme or I don’t know how much the co-infections were looked into as primary. The Covid may be another primary issue here. One way you can kind of tease these apart is I’m really fond of Bruce Patterson’s 14 panel cytokine test, which can separate the kind of inflammation triggered by Lyme from the kind of inflammation triggered by Covid. And there are treatments for covid out there that may be settling it down. So I kind of need to know which of the root causes need to be addressed in what order. From my perspective, it’s usually mold. Most of my patients can’t treat Lyme initially. They’re too sick, they’re too sensitive. Mold is easier.

(01:17:19):

You can come in it more gently. And because mold and Lyme give very, very similar symptoms, you can’t tease ’em apart by symptoms very well. Little bit, but you can’t do it very, very well. So I’d like to take the mold layer off first and see what’s underneath that. That’s one piece of the answer to that question. That will be what that person will need to deal with eventually. But they’re not going anywhere until they don’t quiet the sensitivity first. So again, coming back to my, it gets boring after a while. Limbic vagal MAs cell work in that area becomes essentially because until that being feels safer, they will not be able to respond to the others. Now, some of those in my bias are downstream effects. Like Epstein-Barr, a lot of people spend years treating Epstein-Barr, but if you even think about it, the symptoms that my patients have is rarely explained by Epstein Barr.

(01:18:27):

Their fatigue maybe, but that’s it. So as a general rule, once you have rebooted the immune system by getting rid of the mold and the Lyme, it takes care of everything else. It doesn’t really need treatment. Sometimes it does, but mostly not. So things like that to me are on a back burner. So those are the primary things I think I’m dealing with. And again, treating the sensitivity is absolutely the first thing to do because in terms of EMF treatments, again, that’s in the primary category. Having a smog meter and using it to identify the actual exposures of all of the devices, electrical devices in the house, the home, the computer, what’s in the environment from cell towers. You need to know what you’re being exposed to from everything and then shielding it to the greatest extent possible. But again, I have found that EMF is another type of sensitivity. So that limbic retraining is hugely important in reducing EMF sensitivity. So that’s my overview for a complicated issue.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:50):

Yes. A couple of ideas with the EMF sensitivity, you could potentially hire a building biologist who specializes in EMF to help you sort out, is it magnetic, dirty electricity, radiation? I have another patient, I think it’s actually been a mutual patient of ours, Neil, who has EMF sensitivity. He actually had a doser come to his house and make sure that the geometric lay lines on his property were appropriately aligned as well as the human made EMF. And he’s been working with a person who does NAET to help with desensitization of the EMF. And that has definitely made a difference. So even though the specialists don’t know how to help, you’re not going to get help from a conventional doctor. I mean, you really have to explore because even most functional doctors don’t know how to deal with EMF. And I agree with Dr. Nathan of course, that you got to deal with the mold too. But I think that there are ways to help improve your situation right now. Okay. Okay. Let’s see. So lemme keep going. Okay. Oh, so what would you say to a person who’s a teacher living in Santa Cruz who’s had to move five times in the last year dealing with one moldy living place and moldy classrooms. Can you make an argument for staying in those places and healing the immune system along the way?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:22:05):

Nope. I can’t. The one thing that all people who treat mold agree on, and there’s many things we don’t agree on, is you cannot get Well if you are constantly being exposed to mold, can’t happen. You can get a little better by treating it pretty aggressively, but you cannot get well if you are staying in a moldy environment. And I think almost everyone agrees on that statement. For someone with this description, and I do see it a lot, educational buildings, be it in college or high school or at any level, buildings are often not maintained properly. There are leaks, they don’t get fixed. And a lot of them are moldy. A ton of our patients are college students in their dorms who have been made sick by going to college is super common. But a teacher is in a rough position because usually with exceptions, the administration is not up for measuring it or demonstrating that there is mold in that environment. They’re usually not supportive of that. And if you know you’re in a moldy building, you can’t get well. So I mean, forgive me, is this difficult? Yes, but it’s absolutely necessary that you find a safer environment to be in. If you’re going to get well, there’s no compromise here.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:39):

And I think what I would say to that is virtually all houses will have a little bit of mold. And so looking for a perfect mold-free place on a planet where mold is ubiquitous and mold is the thing that breaks down all of the debris on the planet, means that we will never be in a perfect place. So as long as you are out of the place where you got sick that made you sick in a less moldy place, I do think that you can heal. That would be my caveat to that.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:24:15):

It’s very hard for people to find a, when they keep moving from apartment to apartment. An idea that came to me a number of years ago is the apartments that are going up for rent and in the California area, 10 people will descend on the apartment the first day. You can’t ask them, can I test you for mold first before I move in? They’ll go See you later, buddy. I’ve got nine other people who want this place.

(01:24:48):

All of those places are more likely to be moldy because they’re open. The places that are safe and wonderful and healthy, people are living in them, they’re now moving from them. So it dawned on me at some point that it’s inherently likely to find another moldy place if you keep moving from place to place because a lot of our patients experience that. And my comment would be, if you keep at it, you will eventually get yourself into a safe place and know it’s frustrating for people. It’s a family and moving over and over again. It’s very, very disruptive to your lives. It just has to be done. But I agree with you, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it just needs to be safe enough that your body will allow you to heal there.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:41):

And certainly I have had people pitch a tent in their backyard until they get to the place where their nervous systems are calmer, their mast cells are calmer and hopefully they’re renovating their houses and get back into the house. Okay. Hi Richard. Richard mast cells from Lyme and is hypersensitive, his primary symptom is migraines. He’s done primal trust, but nothing helps except for Sumatriptan and that makes him totally normal. And he’s curious your thoughts. What does that say about him?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:26:23):

Well, migraines are complicated and have multifactorial. There are food allergy components for many of our patients, for women hormonal components. The estrogen progesterone balance makes a difference for many structural things come into mind. A number of our patients have gotten well when they were treated osteopathically. Often you have both neck and cranial components to that that can heal with that type of a process. Again, doing primal trust only and not adding mast cell and vagal components often makes a difference in terms of how effective it can be.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:27:19):

Well, and mast cells do produce serotonin. I did find an article that said that the triptans do have a little bit of mast cell stabilizing effects. So it’s kind of an interesting thought. I hadn’t ever really realized that they could be mast cell stabilizers. Okay. Curtis asks, where would be good places to learn how chronic stress, like being in combat for months or being chronically bullied as a young child causes the cell danger response? So where could they learn more and maybe more about how to heal that?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:28:09):

Gosh, there are tons of resources in there. It’s just looking into the one that you resonate with. There’s even now a field. This is trauma therapy where people specialize in understanding the role of the limbic and vagal system in trauma and helping people to work their way through it. From that perspective, I’ll need to have a hard close in a couple of minutes, Kelly.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:28:39):

Sure. One more. How do I control chronic anxiety and stress with MAS? Psychiatrists don’t understand it. I’ve been on SSRIs for 18 years prior to getting MCAS and now I don’t tolerate SSRIs and I’m stuck.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:28:59):

If you’ve been listening to this broadcast, you clearly need limbic and vagal work in addition to the mast cell treatment. I mean, that is your answer. There’s some other things you might want to look at. Biochemically like copper, zinc ratio, crypto paroles, methylation, chemistry. Those sometimes play a biochemical role in anxiety disorders and can make a big difference if you haven’t been checked for mold toxicity. A lot of my patients with anxiety really have mold toxicity, and that may be part of the treatment. But broken record here, limbic vagal,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:29:45):

Limbic vagal, limbic vagal mast cell. Dr. Nathan, how can people find you?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:29:55):

Well, I’m not lost, so

Kelly McCann, MD (01:29:59):

If they want to track you down, how can they find you?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:30:02):

My website is really simple. It’s neil nathan md.com

Kelly McCann, MD (01:30:09):

And they can get your books anywhere.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:30:12):

Amazon has all of my books.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:30:15):

Great. And the sensitive Patient healing guide will be available on Audible soon. Next month.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:30:25):

It will. I urge sensitive patients to off gas it. I’ve had a couple of people, not just with my book, but any book, there are no chemically sensitive viable inks on any book that my publisher even knows about. So the simple thing is get the book and then put it in the garage or in a place that it can off gas for a while. Some people need to do that, but the audio book will be out soon.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:30:56):

Great. Any last pearls of wisdom?

Neil Nathan, MD (01:31:01):

I think we gave a lot of pearls today. Kelly. I always want to leave people with the message. Every single thing we talked about today is tradable. So get to it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:31:17):

Get to it. Exactly. Thank you so much, Neil. This is a pleasure as always. I love our time to connect.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:31:27):

Kelly and I beginning to have a history with this. We were teaching at an a EM meeting a couple of years ago, and I think someone canceled or they at the last minute told us to step in and do a program together. It was supposed to be a q and a and we had one question and then we launched for about an hour and a half between us just bouncing ideas and thoughts and experiences. And the feedback I got was the audience liked it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:00):

Yeah. So we hope you all love this and maybe we’ll do it again soon. Who knows. Thank you so much for your time in wrap up. We’ll send the replay next week with the transcript and we’ll be off for the Christmas break or holiday and we’ll be back on January 10. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you, Neil, for joining us. This has been a pleasure.

Neil Nathan, MD (01:32:25):

Always, always. Kelly. Take care. Be well.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:27):

Bye everyone. Thank you.

Chat Transcript

00:11:13 Michelle: Welcome, everyone! I’m Michelle, Dr. Kelly’s assistant and I’ll be hanging out in the chat. If you have questions for Dr. Kelly or Dr. Neil Nathan, please put those in the Q&A, found at the bottom of your zoom screen. We’re recording and you’ll get a replay next week!

Feel free to say hi to each other!

00:11:36 David C: Good Morning from Chico, California

00:11:49 Michelle: Hi David!

00:11:51 Rhonda: Rhonda from Santa Rosa

00:12:01 Heather McIvor: Good Evening from Cumbria, UK

00:12:14 Ann Koenigs: Hi from MN!

00:12:17 Julie Bartos: Glenwood, Minnesota here

00:12:17 Annette Douglas: Hello, I am in Humble, Texas.

00:12:34 Keren De Torno: K from NC suggested by Functional Practitioner, Scott JamisonMD

00:12:36 debra: Hi from Vista!

00:12:40 Rachel: Hello from Bristol in UK. Friend passed on your webinar today to me :)

00:12:56 iPhone: Gid’day from Queensland, Australia

00:12:57 boltonm: Hi, I am a Chef/ Culinary Instructor for SUNY Adirondack in Glens Falls NY. I found out about the webinar from Dr. Kelly McCann’s father whom is my neighbor and previous mentor. Thanks for hosting. Looking forward to the info. Happy Holidays!

00:12:58 Steven Mouratidis: Good morning from Australia

00:13:00 Zoom user: Hi from IOWA

00:13:10 Michelle: Welcome, everyone! We’re so happy to have you joining us today!

00:14:22 petersene: Butchery instructor/chef here from Upstate NY

00:15:35 Curtis: Such a pleasure to listen to Neil and Kelly 😄

00:16:00 Michelle: 👋👋👋👋

00:16:08 Kelly McCann: HI everyone!  So nice to see new names nad old friends!  thanks for joining!

00:16:43 Alicia: hello!

thanks for doing this for us! God bless you two!

00:19:43 Alicia: we’re overloaded with toxins we can’t escape from as they intensely spray our skies daily

00:19:57 Nadia Elkhatib: Hi Dr McCann – can we discuss sensitive patients with special needs (autism). That can’t communicate how they feel. Also, ideas for limbic system retraining for them if they can’t do a program like primal trust?

00:20:53 richard ipad: Hi  Richard from Marin

00:21:30 Debra Bullion: What do you think of the drug Amlexanox for MCAS?

00:21:39 Michelle: Great questions, Nadia! Do you mind dropping them in the Q&A section at the bottom of the Zoom screen (see the little speech bubble icon with a question mark)?

00:22:02 Michelle: Hi Debra! Thanks for asking. Do you mind dropping them in the Q&A section at the bottom of the Zoom screen (see the little speech bubble icon with a question mark)?

00:28:27 Michelle: https://prodrome.com/products/prodromeglia-softgel

00:29:21 Michelle: https://shop.kellykmccannmd.com/products/body-bio-pc-100-caps?_pos=1&_psq=body+bio&_ss=e&_v=1.0&selling_plan=3719823619

00:31:25 Annette Douglas: Great to hear!

00:31:35 Paula: That is really encouraging!!!

00:32:58 Keren De Torno: Both Alpha -gal and MCAS (histamine triggers) being more common in the Sensitive person, yet we have FEW available supplement or formulations available WITHOUT these incipient additives.  even most soft-gel caps are made with bovine derived gelatin.

00:34:19 Michelle: Interesting point, Keren

00:37:06 Rachel: Im still on my healing joirney and under 9 months into my

00:37:07 Paula: I feel that the Gupta program answers that  process in healing as people get better

00:37:12 Rachel: chronic

00:37:22 Rachel: illneess i realised i needed to make

00:38:45 Rachel: lofe changes and now know that there are alot of positives to come out of my chronic illness even though i wouldnt want to wish this illness but withoit it i wouldnt have made alot of positives in mu life

00:41:15 Alicia: Dr Aimie Apigian’s Trauma Healing Accelerated has really helped me.

https://traumahealingaccelerated.com/

also, Irene Lyon’s nervous system program 

https://irenelyon.com/

00:41:49 Michelle: Thank you Rachel for sharing so openly.

00:41:58 Michelle: Thank you, Paula!

00:42:06 Michelle: Thanks for these resources, Alicia!

00:44:17 Michelle: Hi Amy. Great question. Do you mind dropping them in the Q&A section at the bottom of the Zoom screen (see the little speech bubble icon with a question mark)?

00:47:05 iPad: Has either Dr Nathan or Dr Kelly treated patients with Fluroquinolone toxicity and MCAS ?

00:48:57 Sharon Smith: Can anyone tell me what three things need done at once – limbic, vagus and ?

00:49:14 Sharon Smith: Mast cell!

00:49:23 Sharon Smith: Thanks anyway.

00:50:39 Michelle: You got it!

00:51:22 David C: Dr. Eleanor Stein has a very good Brain Retraining Program.

00:52:03 M: listening from southern Illinois 

heard about webinar via email from Dr K McCann

really interested in glp1 discussion Jan 10 also. a Dr has asked me about it recently

00:52:38 M: pranic healing with craniosacral healing !

00:52:59 Paula: That is so true in response to the Jaw.

00:53:00 Keren De Torno: mold and mycotoxin illness lends to cause cognitive disabilities that will last until you both leave the mold environment and are concurrently being treated for the specific varietal of mold/mycotoxins for at least 6 months and usually for a year or longer depending on the severity of the infections.

00:53:55 iPhone: So true!  My daughters wisdom teeth and orthodontics were a huge trigger. Stopped her anaphylaxis

00:54:11 ATHINA: TMJ and craniocervical issues are so very complicated. Once the Atlas is out of alignment and the CCJ misalignment, persistent misalignment ensues and creates havoc.

00:54:28 Keren De Torno: Find a Holistic dentist

00:54:30 Michelle: Love what everyone is sharing. Thanks for contributing to the conversation!

00:54:34 Keren De Torno: https://holisticdental.org/find-a-holistic-dentist/

00:55:14 ATHINA: well skilled osteopaths play a role. Atlas orthogonal with proper vectors using uMRI is critical for this, few Clinicians trained at the required level.

00:56:24 Michelle: Just a reminder that this chat will be part of the replay email I send next week. All these notes will be included!

00:56:51 David C: Thanks Michelle!

00:56:55 Paula: Do you know of a good osteopathic cranial sacral physician in San Diego, Ca?

00:56:56 Linda Vrkljan: Terrific, thank you Michelle!!

00:57:13 Michelle: Hi Paula,

00:57:50 Kathy Fong: Feldenkrais is helpful for jaw alighment

00:58:40 Michelle: https://www.drtashaturzo.com

00:58:50 Michelle: Hi Paula, Can you drop that question into the Q&A?

00:59:34 ATHINA: Could you pls speak to your approach with respect to CCI and CCJ syndrome patients , with MSIDS, mold and severe MCAS.

00:59:41 Lisa B: Joined late. What is the name of the book and his name?

01:00:10 ATHINA: research suggests CCJ issues fall into every  category- FM, ME, CCI, RA and so on. Common

01:00:59 Paula: She was an incredible person

01:01:09 Michelle: Dr. Neil Nathan, The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide

01:01:13 Michelle: https://a.co/d/eF4ZRl6

01:01:27 Curtis: So sad about Beth. 😢 She is missed.

01:01:42 Keren De Torno: GodSPeed to Beth O’Hara. She is teaching the Angels!

01:01:42 Paula: Yes, so sad she is gone

01:03:52 Debra Bullion: So sad to have lost Beth!  She is missed by many. ❤️

01:03:59 Paula: I have tears too

01:04:53 iPhone: She gave so much hope to us that there are answers and not to give up!

01:05:00 David C: Mast Cell 360 has a great Facebook community.

01:05:17 Thor K.: Does anyone know just what happened to Beth O’Hara?

01:05:17 Michelle: Thank you all for sharing 🙏

01:06:32 REwire your brain -Francoise Nicoloff: Will we able to access the recording later as I have to do?

01:07:27 Michelle: Yes! I will be sending out the replay video, chat transcript, and full video transcript early next week via email.

01:07:59 lynn kutler: grateful!!

01:08:01 REwire your brain -Francoise Nicoloff: Thank you Michelle – 🤩

01:08:49 Michelle: Thanks for being here!

01:09:00 David C: I’ve been using LDN and Ketotifen for MCAS for about a month & have noticed a small improvement already.

01:09:34 Keren De Torno: Kelly most of those H1 and H2 formulations contain adverse histamine triggers used in manufacturing the drugs. what else can be used if the client cannot afford compounding pharmacys?

01:10:48 Michelle: Hi Keren, Great question—Can you please drop that into the Q&A?

01:12:55 Keren De Torno: thanks David C for sharing

01:14:14 Michelle: Yes, thank you, David!

01:14:51 Michelle: Primal Trust

01:14:57 Michelle: Gupta

01:15:07 Michelle: Annie Hopper

01:15:18 Michelle: https://retrainingthebrain.com/annie-hopper/

01:15:27 Michelle: https://guptaprogram.com

01:15:33 Michelle: https://www.primaltrust.org

01:15:54 David C: https://www.eleanorsteinmd.ca/ryb

01:17:04 David C: Rewiring Your Brain For Better Health

01:17:20 Michelle: Thank you!

01:22:26 boltonm: Thank you!

01:22:32 Keren De Torno: Xlitol is a great biofilm buster

01:22:41 Gail Clayton – Moderator: Do you use organic acids to help you determine methylation status?

01:24:13 Michelle: Hi Gail! Can you please drop your question into the Q&A?

01:25:02 Gail Clayton – Moderator: OK Michelle, thanks> I just dropped it in the Q&A

01:26:10 Michelle: Thanks, Gail!!

01:27:11 Michelle: Bruce Patterson

01:27:39 Michelle: Cytokine Panel

01:27:54 David C: Do you have a link for the Bruce Patterson Cytokine Panel?

01:28:44 Kelly McCann: theradiancediagnostics.com

01:29:02 Michelle: Thanks, Dr. Kelly!

01:30:38 Michelle: Building Biologist

01:30:40 Keren De Torno: Environmental Engineer

01:31:06 Michelle: NAET

01:31:40 Michael: Giving thought to if certain genes like HLA or other mold-related ones are tested with 23andme or other services. If nothing stands out on the genetics testing, can the person readily assume their body is “set up” for resilience and that mold is not the key explanative issue?

01:32:10 Sharon Falchuk: You mentioned resolving Sleep Apnea…can you talk more about how?

01:32:41 Michelle: Hi Michael and Sharon—Can you please drop your questions in Q&A section?

01:33:02 Michael: Hi Michelle, I just did

01:33:22 Michelle: Thank you!

01:33:24 Michael: Also threw in the chat due to the time cutoff, if others here had thoughts

01:33:32 Michelle: Perfect! Good call!

01:33:33 Michael: (if the question isn’t posed)

01:33:35 Sharon Falchuk: Sorry about that! Thanks!@

01:34:27 Gail Clayton – Moderator: you can contact a disability atty for modly workplace or school! One phone call from the atty to the school or workplace will scare them to death because they are required to accommodate for an “allergy” disability

01:34:58 Michelle: Thanks for your advice, Gail!

01:35:01 amy: Not sure if I put my question in the right place?

01:35:46 Keren De Torno: Michael, REAltime labs offers a urine mycotoxin test that can be done at home. You will receive the results of WHAT varietals of molds are in your body.

01:37:08 Gail Clayton – Moderator: When I was renting, I would inspect the apt. thoroughly. I would pay attn to any weird smells. I would look under all the sinks and areas of possible water intrusion. I would select the top floor because it’s less likely someone above me had a water leak.

01:37:25 Michelle: Hi Amy- Did you click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of the Zoom screen? If so, you put it in the right place.

01:37:59 David C: I feel really bad for all the people along the East Coast & Southern States that have been ravaged by massive flooding. I don’t think many of them have any idea what’s coming down the pike health wise ☹️

01:38:00 Keren De Torno: HI Gail. Roofs, vents and ductwork in the attic and HVAC systems need to be inspected as well.

01:38:43 Gail Clayton – Moderator: If the apt had any weird smells or signs of water damage I would move on to another and not rent it. A good rule of thumb is looking at apt. < 5 years old. Once I looked at 20 different apartments before I found one that felt safe, and I was right! It didn’t have any reaction. Yes, I would make sure the sheetrock didn’t have water spots and the a/c vents didn’t have gunk on them.

01:38:59 lynn kutler: Elizabeth Stanley teaches a course on Sounds True based in healing Veterans.

01:39:00 Michael: Keren, if the line of thinking of mold resilience based on genetic results is generally true, then those individuals’ money for testing in general could be used for other ones that are may be more likely to reveal true causes.

01:40:28 David C: Thanks Dr. McCann & Dr. Nathan. Great Presentation!

01:40:29 amy: Thank you

01:40:30 Michelle Droff: neilnathanmd.com

01:40:34 Keren De Torno: Michael until you find the root cause/s of the illness, you cannot start effective treatment

01:40:52 Gail Clayton – Moderator: Thanks Dr. McCann and Dr Nathan!

01:40:59 Michelle: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Neil-Nathan/author/B004IW6A5A?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=450b9295-2911-462b-9017-fe8aabb29a19

01:41:14 amy: Thanks

01:41:28 lynn kutler: I Love that Gail Clayton is part of this conversation!

01:41:41 Michelle: Thank you, everyone, for being here today! What a wonderful and thoughtful discussion. Thank you, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Neil. We will be sending out the replay early next week. Keep an eye on your inbox!

01:41:55 Cathy M: Thank you so much!!  Wonderful webinar.

01:41:57 Julie Bartos: Such a great presentation!!

01:41:57 Annette Douglas: Thanks for this presentation Dr. Kelly and Dr. Neil.

01:42:11 Sharon Falchuk: This was literally one of the best webinars I have seen…THANK YOU for doing it! Greatly appreciated!!!

01:42:14 Keren De Torno: Thank you Dr. Nathan and Dr. Kelly for sharing all the pearls of knowledge and experience. You are both unicorns!

01:42:18 Gail Clayton – Moderator: Thanks Lynn! I’m happy to hear that Neil and Kelly say the same things that I do!

01:42:27 Sheryl Moi (she, her, hers): Thanks for another great session

01:42:29 lynn kutler: <3

01:42:34 boltonm: Thank you both, Happy Holidays!

01:42:35 Michael: Ty

01:42:38 M: I am feeling more confused

maybe outline will help

01:42:45 Michael: Happy holidays

01:42:50 Annette Douglas: Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

It was such a pleasure to host The Spring Center’s very own IV Registered Nurse, Julie Walraven, for our most recent webinar. Julie and I discussed the benefits and applications of IV nutrient therapy for a range of health conditions, from chronic illnesses to general wellness and recovery. Julie highlighted key nutrients such as vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, and phosphatidylcholine (PC), emphasizing their roles in supporting immune health, energy levels, detoxification, and cell repair. We shared patient success stories, including rapid surgical recovery and improved quality of life for individuals with chronic conditions like mold toxicity and mast cell activation syndrome. It was such an enlightening conversation with lots of practical takeaways–thanks for tuning in!

Recommended products from the webinar with Julie:

• Glutathione 
• Methyl-B Complex
• Mineral Support
• BodyBio PC

Julie graciously shared his slides from the webinar. You can find them here.

For those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to learn about becoming a patient at The Spring Center here. 

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:02):

Hello and welcome everyone to our Friday webinar. I’m so happy to be here with you all and with our nurse, Julie Walraven. Thank you so much for being with me, Julie.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:00:16):

Thank you for having me.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:18):

So today we are going to talk about IV nutrients. Julie is the IV Program Director at The Spring Center and we are just so blessed to have her. She has a wealth of information, and this is not just for patients of the spring center, this is for anyone who is interested in IVs. So we’re going to dive deep into why they’re important, how you can use them, whether you are struggling with complex chronic illness or you just want to optimize or you want to prevent getting a cold in this cold and flu season, there’s so many different beneficial reasons to learn about IVs and to know about them and to incorporate them into your health routine. But what I’d like to say first is welcome. Thank you for being here. I’d love to hear where everyone is from and how you came out to how you came to know about the webinars.

(00:01:18):

So please feel free to jump in the chat and leave some information there. It’s so much fun to see where everyone is from. So please feel free to say hello, tell us where you’re from, what you know about IVs, and then if you have questions, please put those in the q and a and Julie and I will be talking. And then eventually we’ll get to your questions. We’ll try to get to as many of them as possible because I know this is an interesting topic for so many people and I know that there’ll be a lot of questions. My assistant Michelle will be in the chat. If there’s anything that questions come up or there’s resources that we want to link to, Michelle will help us out and put those in the chat. Additionally, there will be a replay available sometime next week and there will be a transcript as well as the video replay. So are you ready? Let’s go. Housekeeping aside, let’s talk about what the heck is nutrient therapy, Julie?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:02:28):

Well, it’s actually a really exciting space right now to be in, it has expanded greatly from traditionally we used IV nutrients in a hospital setting and it has now become mainstream where we can access it in our daily lives. The benefits of nutrient therapy are numerous, but what we find is that patients may be under stress, they may be ill, they may have chronic disease processes that they’re dealing with, and nutrient therapy is a way to deliver vitamins and minerals and other products to a patient’s cell directly. So in this sense, we’re going to bypass the gastrointestinal system that we would normally be using to take our supplements and we’re going to go directly to the cell in nutrient therapy. We’re providing vitamins, minerals, phosphatidylcholine that we’ll get to a little bit later and it goes directly into the bloodstream where it passes into the cell.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:03:29):

That’s super cool. When we need to get nutrients to our heart, to our brain, IV nutrient therapy IV is really the best way to go. And just to think about it, why this differs from taking a supplement in the supplement, it has to be digested and absorbed across the mucus layer of the GI tract, maybe even goes to the liver, get some processing. So it takes a while to get to all of your cells and we’re grateful that we have our GI tracts, but also having those IVs available to us can really streamline the process, which is super fantastic. So let’s see. What are some of the most popular nutrients that people can get by iv?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:04:23):

Let’s talk about B vitamins. They’re super exciting. We have a myriad of B vitamins that we need in our daily life. B complex B five, B six. These are the building blocks of our body. They work at the cellular level. They are helpful in preventing infection and cellular degradation. B12 is another one. That one’s super important. We only can get B12 in animal products. We really don’t get enough through just plant-based diet. So B12 is really important for blood and nerve health. It helps regenerate DNA and it can help prevent mega blast anemia, which is characterized by chronic fatigue and weakness. So all the B vitamins are just essential in our daily life. And again, when we’re talking about nutrient therapy, specifically IV nutrient therapy, these can be delivered directly to the cell, so they will be absorbed.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:05:28):

And then there’s things like methylated folic acid or leucovorin, right? So there’s some folic acid versions of B vitamins. And the B vitamins are water soluble, which means we have to keep taking them. We don’t store them. They’re essential for us to have on a regular basis. So what are some other nutrients that are typically given by iv?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:05:54):

My favorite vitamin C hands. So one of the greatest benefits of IV vitamin C bypassing the gastrointestinal system is that we don’t get the side effects of large doses. If we were to give someone 20 grams of oral vitamin C, they would be in the restroom. Just our gastrointestinal system just can’t handle that, right? So we see vitamin C super beneficial both in an immune support, but also when we have patients that are dealing with chronic illness and they have problems with their mitochondria, vitamin C is a great go-to. It is been game changing really at the spring center. We’ve seen people titrate up over a period of time from five grams all the way to 50 grams and really overcome some chronic illness with the support of vitamin C.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:06:47):

Yeah, I remember one patient in particular, she had mass cell activation. She was so sensitive we couldn’t even do phosphocholine or pc. She had been mold exposed and really this poor woman couldn’t even take any form of thyroid hormone, right? Because she was so sensitive to everything that made her feel terrible. So she, here she was, this poor woman hypothyroid gained 30 pounds and she did IV vitamin C for a really long, long, long time. And it helped tremendously.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:07:23):

Yes, yes. Honestly, she said that she was super excited because I remember also she was down to eating one or two foods. She was that sensitive and so she wasn’t getting the nutrients that she needed from her foods. And so by coming for vitamin C and other nutrients, she eventually was able to tolerate IV phosphatidylcholine and lost weight went back to her career that she was very passionate about and is doing quite well.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:07:50):

Yeah, so exciting and it definitely doesn’t get enough press. This whole IV vitamin C for mast cell activation. Vitamin C does have some mast cell stabilizing effects, but I think because it’s often corn-based, if you’re getting it orally, there’s a lot of crappy products out there. People feel like, oh, it’s triggering my mast cells. So here is a way to get it delivered directly to the cells and to help the mitochondria. What are some other things that vitamin C does that we should know

Julie Walraven, RN (00:08:26):

About? Well, super wonderful for us as females that helps regenerate collagen, so that’s super fantastic and it also helps regulate the absorption of iron, which as women also and men, we all really need. So collagen iron also help with wound healing,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:08:49):

Right? Yes. Vitamin C is going to be important for wound healing and maybe for people who have connective tissue disorders too. So a lot of patients who have mast cell may have hypermobility or lacks connective tissue, and though this may just be another way to support those tissues. Let’s talk about magnesium because magnesium is one of my favorites. Tell us more about magnesium

Julie Walraven, RN (00:09:18):

Mine too. Well, magnesium is involved in over 600 enzymatic activities in the body. I mean from sleep to stress to regulating blood pressure, it’s a go-to, it’s amazing. Helps with protein synthesis as well and helps transport calcium and potassium for healthy nerve and heart function. We’ve had some great success with magnesium and calming. So I have a new blend that I’ve curated for the spring center and magnesium is one of the big hitters in that. And people come in, they start their IV and now they’re putting their chair back in the reclining and resting and leaving, feeling rejuvenated from the vitamin C and relaxed from the magnesium. We find it super beneficial for sleep as well.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:10:10):

Yes, magnesium orally of course is helpful for gastrointestinal issues, constipation, reduction of migraines, so important, love magnesium. And when you’re taking nutrients orally, you can also take the nutrients IV. So some people are like, well, if I get an iv, I don’t need to do it orally or if I take it orally, I don’t need to get an iv. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:10:43):

Yes, I definitely think that it’s beneficial for both. So I may do magnesium IV for myself and then also take it at night for sleep. So these vitamins and minerals are going to be utilized by the body, and so we’re going to need to keep replacing them. And you can do both.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:04):

And most of the time we recommend that people do both because you’re not getting an IV every day, you have to eat every day. So you probably have to take your nutrients every day too on top of that if you’re able to. Yeah, just love magnesium. Okay. What is the next nutrient that you want to share with us about?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:11:27):

Let’s talk about calcium. Calcium of course is super important for normal health and muscle function. It’s supportive to the cardiovascular system helps your blood clot and where do we find calcium in our bones, right? So it’s also very essential for bone health. I find that patients coming for a blend that has calcium, it often leave with, they just feel more energetic. You can with if you don’t have enough calcium, you can end up with abnormal heart rhythms. So super essential. And as I mentioned, early bone loss is associated with calcium deficiency, so we’re really looking, attempting along with strength training and exercise to support the bones and minimize any bone loss. So calcium really essential?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:12:24):

Yes, and not only that, I mean I know most of us don’t think about the cells and the ion channels and things like that, but without calcium, our body doesn’t function. It really does not function. We can’t have neurons fire, we don’t have electrical gradients without that calcium. So calcium, calcium ion channel function is dependent upon having enough calcium around, so super important nutrient and yet we don’t want to overdo it. So a lot of people will overdo calcium because their doctors say, oh, take 1200 or 1500 milligrams of calcium every day, and now we’re not necessarily putting it in the bones, it’s going in other places in the body. So finding that right balance, taking those nutrients in the right ratios, getting them appropriately. I think that this is really important too and why you’re such a gem to have at the spring center because you know a lot about the patients and what their medical conditions are and what they need.

(00:13:41):

And this is the difference too. I’d like to point out you can get an IV on any corner, especially here in California, and you’re going in, and I know people are well intentioned, but doing it with a medical clinic, with medical supervision where it can be personalized and individualized, I think is so critically important and really differentiates the places where you can get IVs. I’m seeing in the chat people are from all over the world. We have some people from Bangkok, Thailand. Hello. That’s amazing. And it is really important as a clinician and even as a patient to be discerning, where are you getting your nutrients from? Where are you getting your IVs from? I think a lot of these places it’s colored water. So we want to really have a therapeutic effect and I would encourage you to really think about it from that perspective. You don’t want to pay for colored water. You want nutrients that are really going to move the needle on your health. Okay, let’s talk about zinc because zinc is super important.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:15:05):

Zinc is amazing. Obviously there was a lot of discussion around zinc during covid. People lost their sense of taste and smell because zinc was stripped from the body in that virus process. So zinc has become a lot more important or a lot more mainstream, but I love zinc. It’s involved in over a hundred enzyme activities in the body. It helps with wound healing. It definitely helps your immune system. An interesting fact in preparing for this reading a lot about fertility and zinc specifically, it modulates the synthesis of androgens, right? Such as testosterone. And so this is important for men too, right? Zinc deficiency is related to alterations in sperm that can lead to infertility. So men and women can greatly benefit from zinc. It’s as you were mentioning Dr. McCann, it is one of the things that I love about our Ivy program at the spring center. We do provide Myers cocktail and ours is specially curated with zinc. And the certification program that I went through was fantastic in providing us with protocols and then asking us what do we think about adding? And so when I decided to add zinc, I checked in with them and they thought that that was a fantastic idea. So that’s a really great IV that we provide including zinc.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:16:36):

Awesome. Yes, I mean the more that we delve into this, the more we realize zinc is important for skin health, regeneration of skin. Usually if people have eczema or psoriasis or some sort of skin rashes, oftentimes it can be because of zinc deficiency. We learned with a German test called the IGL, which is sadly no longer available, that when people had toxic exposures and those toxic exposures attached to the DNA, they called DNA adducts, they actually interfere with the body’s ability to transcribe that DNA and therefore cause problems also leads to oxidative stress. In order to get the DNA addicts off, we use phosphatidylcholine, which we’ll talk about, but in order to repair the DNA, you need zinc. So if you don’t have enough zinc after all of your pc, it’s going to be very difficult to repair that DNA because the enzymes require zinc in that process. So love, love, love zinc. And then of course when we’re talking about zinc, we have to pay attention to the copper. We don’t typically give copper iv, but yeah, zinc, so many beneficial reasons to add zinc to your IVs. Okay, what’s next? Julie?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:18:08):

Chromium. This is a trace mineral that is not necessarily talked about a whole lot, but has a lot of benefits. Specifically it enables insulin to function so we can share our resources at the end with the references. So there was a number of papers on the benefits of chromium, especially with weight loss. So it helps metabolize carbohydrates, proteins, and fats and because it helps regulate insulin and helps insulin to function. And we’ve seen a lot of improvement in blood sugar control with chromium. So we provide that in our immunity IV at the spring center

Kelly McCann, MD (00:18:52):

And with so many people recognizing that weight loss is important, potentially using GLP agonists to help support that as part of our weight loss program at the spring center, we do highly encourage people to take advantage of the IVs because it’s able to provide those nutrients that may be lacking. So how do you decide which nutrients you need for yourself?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:19:24):

Well, we can do some testing. Patients would be doing the testing. So we have a couple that we like the NutrEval and then Metabolomics. Those are the two go-tos that I like to use in talking about what patients might need. Obviously we’ll be doing some baseline labs looking at the overall general health and Dr. McCann does some very in depth labs that’ll help us as well. It also is really beneficial to just sit down and talk about, tell me about your health history. What have you been struggling with? So a lot of times we can discern what IVs might be beneficial for patients just by listening to their symptoms. I can’t sleep, I’m always cold. I get tired really easy. I feel winded climbing stairs. I work out and then I’m exhausted for two days. So in talking about what nutrients someone might need, I think it’s a combination really of a good assessment and then some nutrient testing.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:20:27):

Right. So the nutrient testing that Julie mentioned, the NutrEval, the Metabolomics test, those are from Genova Diagnostics. There are other companies out there. One of the reasons that we really like these tests is because they’re looking at metabolic pathways. If you can take substance A and go to substance B, then go to substance C and you need zinc for A to B and chromium from B to C or a B vitamin and you’re stuck in that pathway, that’s going to give us a clue as to where the deficiencies and insufficiencies reside and then help us understand and build the personalized nutrient for the individual patient. So what are some nutrients to consider for things like fatigue?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:21:24):

Well, I think the B vitamins are crucial. Vitamin C as well. I really like the zinc. I think that when we talk about people that are chronically fatigued or they’ve just potentially had an acute illness and they’re just still exhausted afterwards, I really like the go-to of zinc and I think magnesium because of 600 enzymatic activities, right? That’s a lot. You’re going to need magnesium. So those specifically I think. And also that would be well-suited for stress and travel. People that are getting ready to get on a plane, we can look at the oral supplementation that they might benefit from some increase in vitamin A and vitamin D and then couple that with a great IV nutrient of B, B complex C, zinc, magnesium, all of that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:22:19):

That sounds fantastic. So tell us a little bit more about the mood and energy boost IV that you curated.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:22:29):

Yes, those are the nutrients specifically. And the thing I really like about this one is it’s malleable. So we start out with five grams of vitamin C, we double the dose of B complex. I usually am testing patients to see whether they would benefit from a methylated B12 or a hydroxycobalamin, which is hydroxy B12, and then it has some zinc and magnesium. It’s blended in sterile water, so it can actually be given on the same day as IV phosphatidylcholine. So I love that. Right? You can come two for one, it takes about 90 minutes total and you can be on your way. And then if patients want to increase, let’s say they are wanting to deal with a chronic illness with the increase in vitamin C to work up to a higher dose, they can still receive those nutrients and we can increase the vitamin C five gram increments is usually what I do. And then we can see how they do each time.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:23:26):

So I know that we need to do some testing in order to give people higher doses of vitamin C. Can you speak to that so that our audience can learn?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:23:35):

Sure. So we do a specific test called a G6 pd, and it’s basically what we’re looking at is whether or not you are sufficient in an enzyme that metabolize the vitamin C, what the research has shown in patients that are insufficient or don’t have enough of this enzyme that you can actually have some breakdown of your red blood cells. So we want to be really careful in hospital settings in the intensive care units, even with an insufficient enzyme. There are some studies where they have used higher dose vitamin C, but that would be under a hospitalized, obviously very carefully monitored situation, but for us, you can still get up to 10 grams of vitamin C, which is a really nice dose, will feel supported with that even if you are insufficient in that enzyme. So typically we do that as a one-time test. It’s just a regular blood draw covered by insurance as far as I know. And then we just keep that in your chart and we can dial up the vitamin C typically up to about 50 grams is where I find people have the most benefit and minimal side effects.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:24:53):

I think that some cancer protocols can take it up higher, but we don’t tend to necessarily do that makes for a really long IV as well. You’d be sitting there for a long time. So yes, G6 pd, there are some people who are borderline and there are some situations where the enzyme can become a little bit more deficient. And so if somebody has a border borderline G6 pd, I would recommend rechecking it before you administer or receive that IV vitamin C if you’re going to escalate those doses. But that’s a pretty rare circumstance. Most people are sufficient or really insufficient. They’re not. I think out of the hundreds that we’ve checked in the past year, I’ve seen maybe one that’s pretty borderline.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:25:42):

Right.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:25:45):

Let’s see. So we talked about the mood and energy boost. Let’s talk about weight loss and our immunity iv. I think that there was a question about that too.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:25:59):

Oh, okay. I didn’t see that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:26:01):

That’s okay.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:26:01):

So the immunity IV has, it has a lot of nutrients in it, vitamin C, B, vitamin, magnesium, calcium. It also has chromium in it, and that’s where the research is showing that chromium is super beneficial for supporting insulin and therefore regulating blood glucose. There are a number of studies with oral chromium and IV chromium actually being superior. So I really like that profile for the weight loss patients.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:26:38):

Very cool. And we’ll talk more about weight loss as we move on and talk about phosphatidylcholine, but I think that this next thing I want to talk about is the surgical patients. So tell us about some of our wins for these patients who have done IV nutrient therapy before surgery.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:26:58):

So I had a gentleman who came in, he was going to have a shoulder replacement and he said, I want to know what might be beneficial. I had curated a nice blend of nutrients with a good amount of hydration in it, and I said, let’s try this before and after surgery. So he came for a number of IVs, he had his surgery, he came back for a couple more and came in one day and he said, so my surgeon asked me, what exactly are you doing since you’ve had your surgery? I just can’t believe it. You’re like already going to physical therapy. Your physical therapist is saying you’re flying through. And he told him I had gone for nutrient therapy. So that one I’ve found with a couple patients, and I have a few patients coming up who are going to be doing the same, but just in terms of wound healing, his actual wound incisions were beautiful. There’s a great amount of zinc in that IV as well, supporting wound healing. And he actually flew through surgery, had a great recovery, is doing very well.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:28:12):

Yeah, it was pretty magical. I think the surgeon told him he was the fastest recovered patient a surgeon had ever had in his entire career. So kudos to IV nutrient therapy and Julie for figuring out an amazing formula for that. Maybe tell us a little bit more specific. So how many did he do before, if you remember? What was the timeframe between when he did it and when the surgery occurred and then post-op care? Do you remember those specifics? Sure,

Julie Walraven, RN (00:28:48):

Sure. Yeah. I believe he came for two or three prior to his surgery and then he had his surgery and then when he was cleared to receive nutrient therapy, he came back for a couple more, but at six weeks out he was graduated from a good portion of his physical therapy, which is really unheard of when you’re doing shoulder replacement surgery. And I think, I am not sure of his complete timeline, but I know he graduated early from physical therapy. Totally. They said, okay, you’re full range of motion back to lifting weights and he’ll actually be coming in the next couple of weeks. So I’ll get an update then.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:29:27):

Perfect. That’s so cool. So in thinking about it this way, do you think it would be helpful to do this for lesser invasive surgeries, plastic surgery, cosmetic surgeries, colonoscopies, what do you

Julie Walraven, RN (00:29:47):

Think? Yes. I actually had a patient come before their colonoscopy, come for hydration the day before and did super well, then came back for PC after and said, I really sailed through it. I wasn’t dehydrated even despite losing a lot of fluids with the prep and they bounced right back and were back to work the next day. So I think I’ve also had a patient who had recent pretty extensive cosmetic surgery and she has done very well. She came for an IV a couple times the weeks leading up to that, and then when she was cleared from surgery, she came back and had a few more and said, I don’t know what you’re putting in that bag, but I feel amazing. So I think when we talk about fluid shifts with the stress of surgery not being able to eat or drink, right, patients are already going into surgery a bit on the dehydrated side and they’re also missing nutrients because they’re not able to eat full meals. So I think pre and post-op is really the ideal situation for supporting people through their surgical or procedural settings.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:00):

That’s such a cool idea. I think that needs more press.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:31:07):

Agreed.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:07):

So here we are. Here we are. Spread the word right, Pre-OP IVs and post-op IVs. Okay, let’s talk about pc. My favorite nutrient.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:31:20):

Sure. The protocol that we use at the spring center is based off of the PK protocol, which was termed after Patricia Kane who started the PK protocol. And basically at the spring center we have four components to our protocol, phosphatidylcholine, sodium, phenyl, butyrate, leucovorin, which is the active form of B nine or folinic acid, and then amazing glutathione. So we’ve had great success with phosphatidylcholine. So what is pc? It is our cell membrane is made up of about 70% phospholipid layer. So what happens to ourselves when we’re under stress, if we have a chronic illness, if we have trauma, if we have surgery, our cells can get leaky, they’re not functioning well or they could be compromised by mold toxicity or other illnesses. So we administer IV phosphatidylcholine to do two things. One to help seal up that membrane, that cell membrane, what’s happening there, mitochondrial function.

(00:32:42):

So if our mitochondria are not functioning properly, we’re not going to feel well. So by healing up that cell membrane, we’re able to support the mitochondria because they are our powerhouse. They make our ATP our energy. The other thing that phosphatidylcholine does that I really have found beneficial with working with patients is it helps with mold toxicity. So PC is a lipid, lipid is going to stimulate our gallbladder to dump bile. Bile is where we actually store those mycotoxins. So patients who are coming for IV PC for mold illness are getting two supportive factors, one being the actual helping seal up that cell membrane and then the other being actually stimulating the gallbladder to dump bile and helping the patient to excrete those mycotoxins. So we navigate that with their binders if they’re taking it, sauna, colonics, coffee enemas, just to really optimize the use of the pc.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:33:49):

And a lot of patients ask about taking oral PC along with their IV PC. What do you like to share with patients?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:33:59):

I say absolutely. Patients are usually coming once a week for the IV pc, and if they’re taking it orally, we’re going to be able to actually progress through that protocol much easier because the body is being exposed to PC orally during the day throughout the week, and then they come for their IV once a week. I tell patients, you don’t necessarily have to take your oral on the day that you come to see me for pc, it actually is more beneficial because I can see how are you tolerating the IV dose that I’m giving you that day. So IV PC crosses a blood brain barrier. So we are seeing neurological support with this. Patients are often reporting increased energy, but also clearing of their brain fog. I haven’t been able to think or do my job or really participate in a family conversation, and I’ve been coming for PC and now I’m actually feeling like I can participate. And so I had a teacher tell me that she went to a staff meeting and it was the first time that she felt like her brain was clear enough that she could actually contribute. And she got a lot of support from her boss at the end of the meeting saying Your input today was really noticed and appreciated. So that was super exciting. And she’s only come I believe, four times. So patients often see a really significant change after a few IV sessions.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:35:29):

Yes, we love oral PC and IV PC and some of the reasons that the oral is important do on top of the IVs is that the oral has all the other phospholipids as well that are in the cell membrane and ethanolamine, phosphol, serine, phosphol and acetol. We want to make sure that we’re getting those in two. So I always encourage people to do oral PC along with their IV PC, but the fastest way to really clear the brain, heal the brain inflammation is that IV PC for sure. Okay. What are some other things that IV PC or PC is good for?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:36:16):

Well, we have seen patients who have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So we’ve seen regeneration of liver cells in the use of pc, right? And I’m blanking for a minute. Oh, well, it helps with acetylcholine, right? So that’s going to be really important for energy

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:47):

And brain function. Again. So the acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that is used predominantly in the nervous system in the brain. And so PC will be your, the choline portion will be the building block for acetylcholine. Okay. What is the other important ingredient in that PK protocol that you just love?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:37:12):

For me, glutathione, I love all four ingredients, all four parts. But glutathione is our master antioxidant. It’s made in our body, it’s recycled in the liver. When we’re under stress or we have a chronic illness or just even as we age, we may not recycle it as efficiently. So glutathione has been super fantastic in that whole detoxification process. Patients sometimes can tolerate IV glutathione even better than they can tolerate it orally or vice versa.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:49):

You’re on the opposite sides of that, right? Julie likes her iv. Dr. Kelly prefers the oral any day of the week.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:37:58):

Yep. So it’s super beneficial, but again, I tell patients, you can skip your oral glutathione on the day that you come for your IV and we’ll see how you tolerate each dose. So we titrate up both the phosphatidylcholine and the glutathione in a stair-step fashion so that we can see how patients tolerate it. And I have a few patients who are on a really high dose and loving it. I had a patient yesterday who came for chelation, and she looks over at the whole setup and she says, I am getting glutathione today. I, so patients actually will crave it. They want it. So I love it.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:38:37):

I love when that happens.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:38:40):

Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. No, no, go ahead. What else is glut? I love in the IV program, it can be done as an add-on. So let’s say you’re coming for IV vitamin C, we can add on glutathione at the end. So because it’s mixed with dextro and water, it is compatible with any of our IVs. And so I like that to use it as an add-on as

Kelly McCann, MD (00:39:06):

Well. It’s good for so many things. Can you share some other things that it might be good for or tell us a little bit more about it?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:39:15):

Sure. Well, it helps you make your DNA, right? So that’s the building block of proteins and cells. It’s great for immune function. So obviously in this time coming up for travel, I find it really beneficial for patients to come and get IV glutathione. Some people have said, Hey, I felt like I was coming down with something. I came for my IV and I felt like I made a right turn and I went back to health. It helps regenerate vitamin C and vitamin E, so that’s super important. Assist with apoptosis or cell death, helping clear things out. And I think just overall, it’s a great immune support, helps your liver and your gallbladder deal with fats. So patients that have difficulty with that often find that it’s super beneficial.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:09):

Glutathione is really an amazing molecule, and there are some studies using very high doses of glutathione in certain conditions like Parkinson’s disease that we’ve been playing around with some of our patients and having some success with too, right?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:40:27):

Yes, yes. I saw one of our patients yesterday, and he’s tolerating actually 3000 milligrams, which is a very high dose and says he feels great on it. He said, I feel like my constitution is better. So he’s noticed a difference.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:45):

Fantastic. Super. Cool. Okay. And then let me just pause on the liquids that you mix the IVs in, because you have said some things are compatible. Some things I think it’s important to clarify that for our listeners.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:41:08):

So the PK protocol with the IV phosphatidylcholine is mixed in dextrose 5% in water. And why that is, is they’ve found that it’s not really compatible with sodium or sodium chloride specifically. And so we find that a lot of IVs use 0.9 normal saline sodium chloride, and actually mixing that with PC creates a bit of a soap. And so not good in your veins, not good in your veins. So when we’re looking at what patients might benefit most from, we definitely will have that conversation of, oh, are you coming for PC? Okay, then we’re going to do an IV that’s mixed in sterile water and that’s able to be done.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:41:59):

And then some nutrients, however, we mix those in the sodium chloride. So there’s some that are not compatible.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:42:09):

Right,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:42:09):

Right. Okay. Let’s talk about chelation. What is chelation?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:42:17):

Well, chelation is an IV form to test and remove heavy metals. So in our body, we’re exposed to metals in many ways, so through our water source, through our food source, through dental. And so over time, those metals are absorbed into the body and they’re stored in our soft tissue and our bones. And why is that important? Well, at high levels, toxic levels in our body can create all sorts of havoc. So we’re talking about neurological disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s with high levels, and also specifically with lead. Lead loves bones. So lead will actually replace the inside of your bone, creating osteoporosis and setting you up for a high risk of fracture. Chelation is a process where we actually will do testing to see what your levels of metals are in your body. So we do a pretest where we collect your urine, where you collect it, and that shows what you’re currently being exposed to on a daily basis. And then we administer two forms, a chelation, DMPS and calcium, EDTA, and then we have you collect your urine for nine hours after those are mailed off to doctor’s. Data is the program that we use, the testing program that we use, and that shows what your metal burden or what is stored in your bones and in your tissues and

Kelly McCann, MD (00:44:00):

That you’re excreting.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:44:02):

That you’re excreting. And so with that information, Dr. Kelly and I can come up with a plan for chelation. So the chelators actually will pull the metals from the soft tissue and the bones and you’ll excrete it through your urine and your stool. So that being said, super important as we’re talking about nutrients to talk about nutrient replacement. So a lot of times our chelation protocol that Dr. Kelly has written is very, very supportive in the nutrients that you need to take, but we also sometimes will have you take IV nutrient therapy as well. It may be that you’ll do that before your chelation or during your chelation rounds all the way through them up until the end of chelation. So we typically do about 10 cycles of chelation, and then we’ll have you retest

Kelly McCann, MD (00:44:59):

And the chelators pull out many of the metals. They have different affinities, so DMPS, DMSA, those tend to pull out mercury predominantly. They do pull out some lead. And then EDTA pulls out lead cadmium and a variety of the other toxic metals, antimony, tin, et cetera. The EDTA has a higher affinity for lead than it does for cadmium. So sometimes we’ll see high levels of lead first and then as people progress, they’ll have higher levels of cadmium minerals or as these metals are coming out of the body. What have been some interesting cases that you’ve seen with chelation?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:46:00):

Well, I think the one thing that I didn’t mention earlier is that toxic metals can also cause cardiovascular disease. They can cause hypertension. So we’ve had some patients that have had other disease processes such as these go on, they’ve come for rounds and rounds of chelation and are actually, their blood pressure has stabilized, their kidney function is better. So heavy metal toxicity can create kidney disease. So I’ve had some patients go through that. I had a patient with polycystic kidney disease who did rounds of chelation, and she was able to actually go back to eating more proteins. Her blood pressure stabilized. So we see it in a myriad of disease processes, but patients who come have a few patients who’ve come for 40, 50, 60 rounds, a number of rounds of chelation and their skin improves, their blood pressure improves just their entire constitution improves, their mental clarity improves, right, with the removal of these toxic metals.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:14):

Yes, and we’re all exposed, and it may be that the impacts aren’t obvious at the outset. So one of the cool stories that I’ll share is there was a woman who had a coronary calcium score done and she was doing all the right things, eating all the right food, exercising. She looked like a goddess, super healthy. Her coronary calcium score was very high, and her kidney function was declining a little bit. And so we figured out we did chelation and her cadmium levels were off the charts. And so she was experiencing that kidney insufficiency with the cadmium burden and also developing atherosclerosis and coronary calcification, and she did lots of chelation. And not only did her kidney function improve, her coronary calcium score has also decreased. Super cool. That is super cool. So I love the patient with a polycystic kidney issues and thinking about the fact that if there is a genetic weakness, an area of concern, say you have a family history of cardiovascular disease, thinking outside the box more than just going to the cardiologist and looking at your total cholesterol, your LDL, your HDL and your triglycerides, there’s a world of things that could be impacting that underlying genetic predisposition that may really transform your health and transform your life.

(00:49:08):

If you’re thinking, okay, well if I have this genetic predisposition and I also have exposure to lead or cadmium because I grew up in Flint, Michigan and drank a lot of leaded water, you might really want to look at getting assessed for toxic metals. I think it’s important. Okay. What about hair testing?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:49:38):

Some patients can do hair testing. I don’t know that we’ve used it too much at the spring center, but actually my son did some hair testing a number of years ago when we were trying to figure out our health journey or wellness journey back to health. And so it was interesting. You can go to pretty much any barber and ask them to clip hair. They will take a section right at the root. If you have your hair colored, we’ll try and find an area that has not been colored and you can mail it off. Doctor’s data, I think does hair testing, and that’s one way to see by getting right to the hair follicle what your body has been storing

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:27):

And excreting. So it’s still looking at excretion and it’s still looking at snapshot and time. So we’re not really talking about assessment of body burden too much. It’s more current snapshot and the ability to excrete. So for people who have children with autism, for example, or people who are extremely sick, it’s possible that you could have a burden that you’re not capable of excreting. And so I think it’s important to understand where you are in your health journey and what the test is able to show us. We see this with our mycotoxin testing too. Oftentimes, sometimes the sicker people are part of the reason that they’re sick is because their detox pathways aren’t working. They can’t excrete and get rid of the toxins. And so with a urine test, with a hair test, we’re depending upon the body’s ability to excrete those metals to actually see them in the test. So that’s important to remember. It’s kind of a weird concept to think about, but unlike a blood level, so a blood level is going to tell me what’s in the body at that moment in time. So can we talk about blood levels too,

Julie Walraven, RN (00:51:55):

In terms of heavy metals? Yes. So it’s often our great first screening. We’ll do blood lead level or blood mercury level as a screening tool to say, okay, if you have any metal in your blood, it shouldn’t be there, so you really should be at zero. And so we find patients that have single digit numbers and that means it’s actually in your bloodstream. So that can be a super great screening tool to say, okay, this is definitely an issue where we’re going to need to look into chelation.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:30):

Yes, and it’s also the gold standard, so it is really important for documentation purposes and talking about removal of these things from a medical legal standpoint to say somebody has a lead toxicity. Well, if your lead level is too, according to the CDC, that’s not a toxic lead level now, there is no safe level of lead in the body. So we need to investigate where that lead is coming from. Is it coming from the bone? Is it coming from the drinking water? Is it coming from the fact that you are a amateur gun enthusiast and you’re going to the shooting ranges and there’s lead in the casings and you’re breathing in lead as you are doing target practice. So really important. Understand these subtleties. Do you want to touch on quickly before we jump into questions chelation for cardiovascular disease and the TACT trial?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:53:40):

If you wouldn’t mind, I’ll let you go over that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:42):

Okay. I haven’t read up the most recent literature, but they did do a trial using chelation for the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular atherosclerosis. It’s called the TACT trial, TACT, and definitely something worth keeping an eye on because we know that lead in the blood vessels can drive oxidative stress, inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, and some of the studies I remember all cause mortality for lead exposure increases cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease like eight times. I mean, it’s crazy how much these metals can impact people’s health. When would be a good time to do chelation when you’re in your health journey?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:54:47):

I think I’ve had patients of all ages do chelation, and so I think it really is determining if this is part of your body’s burden. So I have young, very healthy looking patients who actually had large amounts of lead, specifically a young woman. So I think it’s important to think about this, especially for people who are thinking about having a family. So if you have a health issue that a body burden that you’re not able to figure out, seeing a functional medicine practitioner such as Dr. Kelly would be amazing because metals and mycotoxins can be passed on down to your children. And so if you’re thinking about conceiving, this is a time to really optimize your health so that the body burden that you have can be eliminated before you pass it to your children. So I think it’s the entire gamut of from young to patients who are much older who are dealing with chronic illness or total body burden of metals over time, right? There was lead paint for many, many years.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:56:04):

Gas,

Julie Walraven, RN (00:56:04):

Right? Lead gas gadolinium also historically was not able to be excreted by the body. The gadolinium that’s being used now is much safer. But Chuck Norris’s wife is a great example of someone who had multiple MRIs and then found that she had gadolinium toxicity. So it’s all part of peeling that onion of figuring out what’s going on with you specifically in your health journey. But I think metals is a big one to look at for sure.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:56:35):

Yes. For the folks on the more sensitive side who are still in the beginning stages of their health journey, we typically don’t have people do chelation until they’re substantially improved. The reason for that is because as you could imagine chelation is, it’s kind of tough on the body. These chel leaders are not perfect matches for grabbing the metals. They may grab some minerals, and so we have to do nutrient replacement replacement. If people are depleted to begin with, you’re probably not ready for chelation. So working with a practitioner who’s really understanding the timing of these things is super important.

Julie Walraven, RN (00:57:29):

Agreed, well said.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:32):

Any last things you want to share before we jump into some of those questions?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:57:37):

The only thing I’d like to go back to briefly in the PK protocol, the other ingredient that I really love is the funnel butyrate. And so butyrate is a short chain fatty acid in our body. We often don’t have enough of it. You can find it in foods such as ghee, you can get some butyrate from there, but it’s super beneficial in our colon and that is a product, one of the parts of the protocol that will add in a little bit later. Once you’re tolerating IV PC, I have found patients do really well with it. There is a large amount of sodium in it, so patients that have extremely high blood pressure, we may not add that in until their blood pressure is really under control. But I’ve had a couple of patients who have said, wow, once we added in the butyrate, I really noticed it was a game changer for me. So it assists the phosphatidylcholine in the body in terms of healing up that cell membrane?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:42):

Yes, it has anti-inflammatory effects as well. The literature shows a lot of data for using it. For neurodegenerative disorders, it’s neuroprotective and yeah, as Julie said, you can get some in food, but you can also take it as an oral supplement as well as the IV version. So yeah, love butyrate too. Okay, so we have some questions here. Let’s see what we can do. The first question, if you want to pull up the questions, I’ll read them for you, Julia, and then you answer, I’m very sensitive to vitamin C with colon irritation. Where do you start the dose without sequelae?

Julie Walraven, RN (00:59:29):

We typically start with five grams of vitamin CI do in the Myers cocktail it has a lower dose. So definitely if people are extremely sensitive, what we find, and I’m not certain Rhonda specifically if this is oral vitamin C or if you’ve had IV vitamin C, but we typically will see patients tolerate IV vitamin C much better at starting doses than they would that same dose as an oral dose. So again, we’re bypassing the gastrointestinal system and we don’t see the same colon side effects in an IV form that we see in an oral form.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:00:12):

Right. Someone asked about stage four chronic fatigue syndrome. Somebody told this person they had stage four chronic fatigue and they can’t process vitamin C genetically. What is that about?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:00:28):

Would you like to weigh in on this one, doctor?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:00:30):

I mean, my thought is that it’s probably the G6 PD deficiency that that person was talking about, which is not necessarily genetic, but rather the amount of an enzyme that that person can make and therefore it increases their risk for breaking apart their red blood cells and we don’t want to do that to people. People don’t like that. So that’s probably what it is. I’m not aware of an actual genetic problem with vitamin C. I mean we all have to have vitamin C, right? We would probably do very poorly without it. So I think that that’s what they’re referring to. Rhonda also asks what form of magnesium is used in the IVs?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:01:22):

I am typically using magnesium chloride. It is the most tolerated form of magnesium in the IV form. So there are multiple other magnesiums that we love for oral such as magnesium, three innate magnesium glycinate, right? In the IV form, we’ll use magnesium chloride.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:01:44):

I think magnesium sulfate is also available in IV form, but that one doesn’t tend to be as well tolerated. Right,

Julie Walraven, RN (01:01:54):

Especially with our sulfur sensitive patients. So

Kelly McCann, MD (01:02:00):

Do the benefits of IVs stop when you stop the IV treatments?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:02:06):

That’s a really good question. I think that IV nutrient therapy can be beneficial as a lifelong adjunct, but patients who are dealing with chronic illness will benefit from nutrient therapy in a more acute setting more often. And then we like to say, okay, I think you’re at a good place. Maintenance is a good place to go now, and so our bodies are going to need nutrients for the rest of our lives. So I think there’s a place for IV nutrient therapy. I myself receive it in a maintenance setting and then when I need it more acutely, have it more frequently. So the benefits are there to help support the body’s return to health, and then I think you can benefit from a maintenance

Kelly McCann, MD (01:03:00):

Then Jackie, follow that up. In other words, how long do the results last after the treatment stop.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:03:08):

Got it

Kelly McCann, MD (01:03:08):

Thanks, Jackie!

Julie Walraven, RN (01:03:08):

Thanks, Jackie. I think it is hard to say. I’m not sure that there’s a ton of data in terms of specific timelines of how long I think each patient is individual in terms of how they absorb it, how they metabolize it, what is going on in their health journey. And so I think these are really N of ones, but I find patients who use it in the acute phase support the body back to homeostasis, and then they’re able to transition more to an oral support with intermittent,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:03:42):

Right? Right. Yeah. So if you’re gone for a three month trip and you do IVs ahead of time to protect yourself, it might not have that protective effect the entire time, but you could get a couple of weeks, you could potentially even get a month. Who knows, especially if you have that boost and then are transitioning to oral support with the pc. Many of our patients will find that their benefits last for a certain amount of time, and as they get more accumulation of the PC in the system, the benefits will last longer and longer and then each person can feel that. So okay, it lasts. I feel great for 12 days, but by the end of that second week I’m really needing, I feel like I need another dose. So it varies a great deal. That’s what I would say. Okay. Next question is the IGL no longer available only in the United States, and why did this form of testing stop? Sadly, the founder of the company who figured out how to do the test passed away after a long illness. And so the company is still scrambling to try and figure out what they are going to offer, but there’s nothing like it on the market right now.

(01:05:14):

Let’s see. Alexis asked, what IVs do you recommend for mold detox?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:05:19):

Well, my first go-to IV phosphatidylcholine, I think that’s a game changer for mold detoxification. As I mentioned, it’s going to help with cellular repair, but also actually detoxing your body from the mycotoxins, excreting it from the bile. So those would be my two and myself specifically dealing with mold illness, I have found IV vitamin C to be extremely beneficial. That along with B vitamin, zinc and magnesium, the energy mood and energy boost IV that we are offering has been really well tolerated from a number of our mold patients.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:06:01):

Great. Let’s see. And then which nutrients do you need if you’re wiped out and sore for a couple of days after a workout? So that post exertional fatigue and body aches and pains, what would be helpful for recovery?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:06:20):

I like our nutrient profile for that. It has magnesium, zinc, it also has potassium, sodium, calcium and B vitamins. I like that specifically. And then an oral supplement that I really like for post-workout soreness is PQQ. That’s been really beneficial for post-workout soreness. So a lot of times the soreness is that lactic acid buildup or a combination of lactic acid buildup and dehydration, right? Coming just for hydration with some nutrients would be super beneficial.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:06:55):

And would creatine help that?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:06:58):

Creatine can definitely be beneficial for that.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:07:03):

Can you share why nutrient testing of red blood cells from the big labs such as Quest, LabCorp, or even SpectraCell, which uses white blood cells? Why are those substandard compared to the urine? And I can take that on if you want. They’re looking at different things. So I think that some people use SpectraCell and find that to be tremendously helpful. I’ve used it occasionally over the years and haven’t really found it to be quite as helpful, but that’s just personal preference, that’s practitioner preference. We started doing some of the nutrient testing through Quest and honestly I was kind of disappointed. Most people had elevated levels of selenium and everything else was normal. I thought, well, we want to get some information that we can feel is valid and actionable and if everything is normal, and most people, if you eat a healthy diet and you’re doing okay and the test all comes back normal, there’s no action that is capable of being taken.

(01:08:24):

So we’ve tried it a handful of times. I’m not saying that spectra salt is bad at all. I like the idea of looking at the body’s nutrient needs in terms of the metabolism. So as I mentioned, you know that in order to go from substance A to substance B, you need these nutrients. That gives me a functional assessment of the person’s needs. And I felt like that was a good way to go. But we could certainly combine that with a SpectraCell and cross-reference and figure out more information. Data also has an essential element test, which is a urine excretion test that we could do too. And we’ve used that a little bit as well, especially with our chelation patients. Let’s see. Somebody asked, sounds like IV treatment is not able to happen without labs, correct?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:09:35):

Well, the gold standard for IV nutrient therapy is to have just a baseline lab. So we really want to look at things like your complete blood count, your chemistry panel, a urinalysis, and then the G6 pd. So we don’t necessarily have to do extensive nutrient testing in order to provide IV nutrient therapy, but as I said, the gold standard are those basic labs and those aren’t typically covered by insurance.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:10:06):

And if we, let me see if you could go down the street to the IV nutrient place down the street and they hook you up and they assume that you’re fine. So we’re just going that extra step to really make sure kidney liver function are good, blood counts are good, and it’s important. We’re just dotting our i’s and crossing our T’s. We absolutely do not have to do extensive nutrient testing in order to administer IVs. Let’s see. Do you also do any tests similar to the vitamin C enzyme to test glutathione levels? Does that just show levels or also does it show your body’s ability to process and metabolize glutathione?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:11:01):

We can do serum glutathione levels, right on a Quest or Lab Corp test, but I don’t believe that, I’m not certain that there’s anything that specifically shows how you metabolize it. You may weigh in on this, right. And we’ll often find that patients who are in a chronic illness state will have very low levels of glutathione until they’ve been supported either through oral or IV to a period where their body can actually recycle it appropriately. So you may receive oral glutathione or IV glutathione, but until you get your body into back to homeostasis or into health, you won’t necessarily be able to recycle it effectively.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:11:52):

Right. And an important point with the glutathione that we can order through LabCorp request, we’re looking at total glutathione, which is a combination of reduced glutathione, which the antioxidant version and oxidized glutathione. So I’m using that just as a real biomarker. If somebody’s low total glutathione, then I know they absolutely need it. If it’s in the middle of the range, I don’t know. They could have a lot of oxidized glutathione and I’m not going to know that. There are some specialty tests to look at how you’re processing it, how you’re methylating it. Doctor’s data has a test. There’s another one from a company called Health Vitamin Diagnostic, something like that, out of New Jersey that has a really great test looking at methylation and the precursors of glutathione and reduced and oxidized glutathione. So there are specialty tests. They’re actually pretty expensive. They usually run around three, $400.

(01:13:10):

So it’s not something that I do very often for folks, although it is available. And then we can do genetic testing. I typically use Bob Miller’s functional genomic analysis testing to look at glutathione SNPs and antioxidant SNS methylation SNPs to help if people are having an issue that gives us an idea of why and how to support them with their methylation and their glutathione. Do you need more cystine because you have a snip in the cystine pathway? Do you need more glycine because you have a snip in that pathway that helps the body make glutathione? So there are options there. What IVs would be good for those who have toxic burden are underweight and need to gain weight? Oh, that’s a great question.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:14:05):

That is a good question. I definitely would go to IV phosphatidylcholine. So for the toxic burden piece, right, so specifically I’m not sure what toxic burden you’re referring to, but phosphatidylcholine is great for cellular repair, so that would be one as well as glutathione. Although depending on the toxic burden, we might need to see how well you can tolerate IV glutathione, right? So it’s definitely a slow introduction to that to make sure that you’re able to handle the detoxification that occurs from the glutathione. Right. And then vitamin C, and then I would really like to look into what is the cause of the being underweight, right? That would be helpful in determining further which IVs would be most beneficial. So I think any of the nutrients, whether it be our nutrients that has the magnesium, potassium, calcium, B vitamins, that can be beneficial. And then vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:15:13):

Okay. This next question is definitely for you. Could you speak to the following concern that this person has had around IVs? So personally, that person says they’ve shied away from the IVs because of the metal needle going into the vein between blood tests a few times a year. Part of her or him wonders if the constant needling of the same veins in the elbow creases causing scars in or along the vein. And maybe the body is not being able to go back a hundred percent to how it was before the needle broke through the vein. So concern about scarring and the body’s ability to heal and whether or not IVs on a routine basis are potentially problematic for veins.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:16:06):

Do you think that as we approach inserting any needle into a vein, always really be important to be careful with that? People can develop a bit of scar tissue over time, needling in the same place over many years. So it’s really important to rotate veins. And depending on what you may be receiving when we’re doing IV nutrient therapy, we’re actually inserting just the tip of a needle to enter the vein, but the actual IV itself is made out of plastic. It’s malleable, it’s gentle on the vein. It doesn’t have a sharp end, and so the needle is removed from the vein for the duration of the infusion. So yes, it is something to be aware of and concerned, but I think overall, again, when you’re receiving these nutrients, you’re helping with cellular repairs. So you’re actually going to be able to heal up the small entry into the vein better over time.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:17:11):

That’s really helpful, thank you. Rhonda asked, what did you say you gave the patient getting a colonoscopy?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:17:19):

Sure, Rhonda. I actually used our nutrient blend, which is a base of lactated ringers that has magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, and then B vitamins and zinc.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:17:35):

Great. Okay. For someone who has MTHFR, C677T with B12 levels below one 50 with very low stomach acid, could you compare and contrast how the body would be helped with B12 given IV B12 injections, B12 sublingual, are they all going to help the whole body and the natural stomach acid to jumpstart equally? Are the IVs getting the person there the fastest?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:18:06):

Well, specifically with B12, with someone with low stomach acid and some snips, I have found actually B12 injected into the muscle or B12 given IV to be much more beneficial than trying to give it orally, even sublingual you will get some absorption sublingually without having to get to the stomach. But myself specifically, I dealt with that with some SNPs and I tolerate B12 in an injection form and IV extremely well. It’s been super beneficial for me just to be completely transparent. So I think in cases where people have a really low B12 level, the IV version is superior to any other form, you may not tolerate a large amount iv. And so the slower absorption of an IM injection of just B12 weekly, sometimes twice a week can raise your B12 levels sufficiently.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:14):

And I’m not giving medical advice, but I might suggest that you get checked for pernicious anemia. Yes.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:19:20):

Thank you.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:22):

Okay. Any contraindications for phosphatidylcholine?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:19:28):

Not that I’m aware of. PC is a phospholipid. It’s as I said, our cell membrane is made up of 70% lipids, right? Phospholipids. So it’s something that our body requires. Really?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:44):

Yes, we make it. And because of the toxic world we live in, we often need more. So there really is no contraindication for PC in the PK protocol. The only contraindication is really the lorrin. We avoid giving that to patients with history of cancer. How long should someone take oral PC?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:20:10):

I would say for the rest of your life, quite frankly, I think that would be Dr. Kelly’s answer. In chronic illness, we’ll see large doses, we’ll work patients up to either six capsules or a tablespoon, sometimes even two tablespoons of the body bio PC that we use in the IV version, most of the literature from Europe has shown that patients need about a thousand milligrams per kilogram of body weight in order to clear the toxic toxins on the cells. And so IV PC for that period of time minimally. And then as we talked about earlier, then more of like a maintenance maybe iv, but the oral version I would say we can all benefit from it

Kelly McCann, MD (01:21:02):

Indefinitely. Our body needs to keep making cells until we die, and so we need the building blocks to make those cells. So that’s kind of how you think about the oral pc. And just to give you an idea of what that number thousand milligrams per kilo body weight translates to. That can be, say that’s 10 ampules, how many milligrams is 10 ampules, Julie?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:21:36):

They’re 500 milligrams in two. So two 50 per ampule,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:21:41):

Right? So 2,500 milligrams per iv. It’s going to take anywhere from most likely 25 to 40 IVs to depending upon the size of the person. So that’s just to give you a ballpark. And then remember that we’re constantly being exposed to things. So you’re doing it for hopefully a intensive amount of time to really clear the burden of the environmental toxins, the mold, whatever it is that you’re working on. And then you’re backing off to maintenance for the PK protocol. Do you do a Myers cocktail following the PC?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:22:30):

We can. The Myers cocktail is mixed in sterile water, so that is compatible with the pc. We don’t on every patient with the PK protocol, but I do have some patients that come for IV PC and then I follow with a Myers cocktail.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:49):

Someone asked if non-metal chemicals of all kinds were found extremely high on a urine test, like the old GLP tox test and nothing was done about it. Any words on how certain things administered through the IV could help with clearing the non-metal chemicals out without causing damage on the way out?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:23:12):

I would say for this specifically, probably most beneficial would be pc. So we see that helping with environmental toxicants, right? So we’re clearing those toxicants off of the cell wall with the administration of IVPC.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:29):

Yes. And many of those nonmetal chemicals are, at least in the old GLP tox test are non persistent. So your aths, your parabens, your bisphenols are non-persistent. Avoidance is really key with that. Same thing with a lot of the pesticides. So many of those chemicals are ones that lifestyle modifications can really help a great deal. And then yeah, the PC is just going to clear ’em right out. Is there ever a concern with too much pc?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:24:07):

I don’t believe so. It may be that someone isn’t able to tolerate higher doses, and so there’s a scale of what we administer. And so some patients find their sweet spot and that’s what they can tolerate on a weekly basis or every other week. But I have a number of patients who have reached that a thousand milligrams per kilogram and are still receiving IVs and receiving the benefits from it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:34):

Yes, I think the concern of too much is it’s mobilizing too many toxicants, too many mold, and people don’t feel well more so than it’s actually causing harm. PC has been used in Europe and Asia for decades. There’s really no toxic effects. There’s no LD 50 as we’ve been saying, we make it. So what’s happening if you’re having an adverse reaction is you’re having a detox reaction. So the recommendation then would be to lower the dose so that you don’t mobilize too many things too quickly. And then as you begin to clear out some of these chemical toxicants, you can increase the doses. What dose do you titrate the glutathione between?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:25:21):

So we start out usually at 200 milligrams and we’ll titrate it up to about a thousand milligrams. I have a number of patients that like to go higher than that, and so we just titrate it at 200 milligram increments. And again, people will usually find their sweet spot on that. So I have a few patients myself. I’m at 2000 milligrams. I have a couple patients there as well, and then one at 3000 milligrams

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:48):

And then Dr. Kelly at 400 milligrams. Don’t take care. I’ll puke all over you. Okay. Can you comment on nebulized glutathione?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:26:00):

Would you like to take that one in terms of only because I think Dr. Kelly has a much stronger eye on experience with that. People have had benefit from it, but we do have to be careful.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:26:18):

Yes, IV glutathione can be amazing. There was a piece of medical literature that showed people who had more severe, so the more severe that asthma people had, the less glutathione in the alveoli. So my thought was, oh my goodness, everyone with asthma should get nebulized glutathione. Anyone who’s having breathing issues could probably benefit from nebulized glutathione. And we did it for a while, and then sadly California said, no moss. So we have not been able to administer glutathione nebulized very much. You could also nebulize NAC, which is your precursor to glutathione. That is still available, I think So yeah, it can be really helpful for those patients. Typically, I’m picking ones with respiratory conditions. Next question. This is a general question on IV advocacy with the conventional healthcare system. I’m not sure how much we’re going to be able to add, but I’ll let Julie take a stab at this one. Any thoughts or suggestions on how a family member of someone really sick in the hospital system can get the hospital to agree to have IV nutrient treatments brought into the hospital and even if it’s not covered by insurance, and any strategies that would result in hospital staff needing to accept a family member’s request such as IV vitamin C for super sick patients with covid?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:27:51):

It’s a tricky one. I understand where you’re coming from. I think Paul Merrick is a physician who was a ICU intensivist. He’s the one that’s done a lot of research on high dose vitamin C. So in terms of dealing with the traditional healthcare system, I have found gathering data is important. And so that may be a way that you can advocate for your family member is to look at the data specifically around high dose vitamin C, how it was used. And this is even before covid. There’s a number of studies that were done with sepsis and multisystem organ failure and the use of high dose vitamin C in a hospital setting.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:28:38):

And then you have to have that conversation with the hospitalist, eventually work your way up to administration and best wishes. That’s a really tough battle. Good luck. Do you use binders doing chelation, and then when is the best time?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:29:01):

Yes, we do use binders during chelation. We have a 14 day protocol that Dr. McCann has written, and binders are definitely utilized during that

Kelly McCann, MD (01:29:15):

Protocol. And then what about sauna and the use of binders and what time is best for binders

Julie Walraven, RN (01:29:26):

Away from food? So definitely away from meals, it’s a little bit different for each patient. They find their sweet spot with how they tolerate binders best. Some people take ’em before bedtime and they’re able to sleep through any nausea that they might have. Some patients take them first thing in the morning before they take any of their other supplements or have a meal. Patients that do IV PC will often take their binders around their PC infusion. So we’re stimulating the gallbladder to dump bile, and then we come in behind that with the binders and sweep things up. Saunas definitely, definitely with chelation as well as IV pc. So we’re mobilizing toxins and then we’re heating up the body to excrete it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:30:19):

Okay. I think we’re quickly running out of time. I know we have a few more questions. I’ll take a few more. So anonymous asked about bringing USDA organic food-based supplements, breaking them down with motor and pestle and adding them to IV bags.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:30:40):

I’ll let you weigh in on this one, please.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:30:42):

Oh yeah, I don’t think that that would not work. We really want to give pharmaceutical grade nutrients that are intended for IV use. Even if you’re making them small, they’re not actually getting broken down into the fluid and being able to be administered that way. So unfortunately that doesn’t work. Does chelation help with the MRI contrast gadolinium?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:31:19):

Yes.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:31:20):

Okay. How long does chelation take to remove heavy metals such as barium, cesium, thallium, or is the liquid EDTA best to remove these?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:31:31):

It really depends on your total body burden. So if someone is slightly into the red, I’ll say on a doctor’s data test, it won’t take as long as if you are far more toxic. So everybody’s helian journey is individualized.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:31:50):

Hi, Michelle. Michelle. That’s my assistant in the background. And the other thing I’d say about the barium cesium thallium, those are often contaminants in your food from fracking water being used on our food, especially here in California. So you really want to kind of track down those sources of the heavy metals. And then I think maybe we’ll end with this question. So when are IV nutrients, IV chelation contraindicated beyond the enzyme that we talked about with the IV vitamin C? What about stage of kidney disease, liver conditions, other drugs that they’re taking? Those are good questions.

Julie Walraven, RN (01:32:51):

Sorry, I just was rereading it. I think it’s on an individualized basis. So I think everyone can benefit from IV nutrients. So these are vitamins and minerals that our bodies need. I think, well, one specific case would be if somebody really has severe congestive heart failure where their body couldn’t necessarily tolerate fluid shifts that would be required. That might be one situation where it would be contraindicated in an outpatient setting. So if someone is oxygen dependent and they have severe cardiopulmonary pulmonary compromise, that might not be appropriate for them to receive IV nutrient therapy.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:33:40):

And the same thing with kidney insufficiency. There’s a point at which the toxic metals are causing the kidney problems, but if the kidneys have started to fail and you’re stage even potentially stage three, but definitely stage four, I would not be doing chelation on that patient. Unfortunately. There’s just a point at which we can’t tax that organ more with trying to remove some of the burden that’s causing the problem. So that’s where being proactive in your life is far better always, if at all possible. So I know that we didn’t get to everyone’s questions. These are fantastic questions, but I think we’re going to wrap it for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I’m really happy that you all were here. I hope this was helpful for you. Julie, you are amazing. Just a wealth of information about these things. And do you have any last words of wisdom that you want to share with people?

Julie Walraven, RN (01:34:57):

We are super excited to provide nutrient therapy at The Spring Center for our patients starting in January. We potentially will be able to offer it on a more la carte basis. We’re working out the details of that. I’m available on Tuesdays for 15 minute consultations for our patients. They’re complimentary, so if you have questions or you’re nervous about IVs or you’re just not sure where to start, you’re always welcome to call the spring center and schedule an appointment with me. And I’m really grateful again to all of you, like Dr. Kelly said, for coming and spending some time with us. I really enjoyed it. And let us know how we can help.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:35:42):

Yes, and so what Julie was referring to is that we’re going to have a separate tract for patients. We have our full patients who have access to all of our practitioners, all of our different programs, and then we’re going to have an a la carte track where say somebody just wants to come in for IV nutrient therapy or they just want to come in for immunotherapy with LDA, they don’t have to become full patients and they can still take advantage of the offerings that the Spring center has. And so keep an eye on the website. We’ll be launching that in January, which is right around the corner.

(01:36:23):

Okay. Thank you so much everyone. As I mentioned, we will be turning around and sending out the replay along with the transcripts sometime next week. Welcome back Michelle and her internet cutoff. We’re so glad that she’s back. And that next time when we do another webinar, please mark your calendars. That will be with Dr. Neil Nathan on December 20th, and he is just an amazing wealth of information. Love Dr. Nathan, and we can’t wait to spend some time with him too. So thank you again, Julie. Please contact the Spring Center if you have any questions about our IV program and we’ll see you next time. Bye bye everyone.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host The Spring Center’s very own functional nutritionist, Sarah Choszczyk, our most recent webinar. Sarah and I discussed common fad diets and how they work (or don’t work) as well as elimination-reintroduction diets for food sensitivities. Looking toward the holidays and new year, we talked about prioritizing healthy eating in a balanced and achievable way. As a certified health and wellness coach with a master’s degree in human nutrition and functional medicine, Sarah had so many great tips to share. Thank you for being here to be part of this great conversation! 

Recommended products from the webinar with Sarah:

• Enzalase by Master Supplements
• Body Bio PC
• Shop Evening Primose Oil on Body Bio’s site here

For those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to learn about becoming a patient at The Spring Center here. Interested in booking a nutrition consultation with Sarah? Get started here!

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:03):

Welcome everyone to our webinar series. I’m Dr. Kelly McCann. Thank you so much for being here. And today I have the pleasure of hanging out with my friend. Sarah, do you want to say that for us?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:00:20):

Well, it’s, yeah, it’s Choszczyk. If you want the American pronunciation, we’ll just stick with that. Okay.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:28):

Sarah C, my nutritionist friend, coworker. Sarah has been my right hand gal for a long time, and now she’s here as a certified health and wellness coach. She has a master’s degree in human nutrition and functional medicine from the University of Western States and almost 20 years experience working in healthcare, most of which centered around Chinese medicine, western herbalism, functional medicine, and especially nutrition. She provides nutritional support and health coaching to a diverse clientele, including many of our patients and clients, people dealing with complex chronic illness as well as athletes who wish to improve their performance. Thank you so much for being with us, Sarah.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:01:18):

Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:01:20):

Yes, it’s the perfect time of year to talk about nutrition. Well, it’s always a perfect time of year to talk about nutrition, but especially now heading into the holidays where food is the center of most people’s holidays, celebrations, and so I’m really happy to dive into this with you and to share with our listeners. We’re going to talk about all different sorts of things. I think one of the things I’d love to pick your brain about is let’s talk about fad diets. What are some different fad diets? What are the ones that are really useful? How can people start to more thoughtfully evaluate these different diets to try and find the best diet for themselves?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:02:16):

Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. It’s a good topic to start with. Even now while we’re sort of, like you said, heading into the holidays, people may be a little more relaxed, which is fine about their food heading into the holidays. I think we’ll talk a little bit more about that, about dealing with holiday food later. But at the beginning of the year, oftentimes people will try to pay a little bit more attention to their health. They’ll clean things up, and starting a diet is probably one of the most reported New Year’s resolutions. So yeah, talking about fad diets is a great idea. So a fad diet is obviously, it can be a good diet. It can be a diet that is very restrictive, and the reason it’s a fad is just because it becomes popular, it becomes part of the zeitgeist, it just gets on all the media. So just because a fad diet almost says it’s a fad diet, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad diet, but I think it’s a good idea to look critically at any dietary pattern that is becoming very popular. So for example, we can pick a few, I think popular fad diets right now, very low carb diets. So talking about Atkins, maybe talking about keto, talking about the carnivore diet.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:03:48):

I think those are great places to start.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:03:50):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So if you’re thinking about an Atkins and a keto type diet, we’re going to be looking at dietary pattern that’s very low in carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, and in some cases even mostly whole food carbohydrates, really focusing on getting your fuel from fat rather than carbohydrates, good healthy fats. You’re going to be getting some fuel, of course from protein. And the thing I want to just point out about some of these diets that we talk about in general is there’s sometimes not a great definition. So when I say keto diet, there isn’t one keto diet that is the only keto diet. There’s actually a lot of different sort of subtypes, but generally it is kind of a higher fat diet, a lower carbohydrate diet, and there are ways to do a keto or an Atkins diet or something like that that can actually be really beneficial.

(00:04:55):

So for example, folks who are choosing really high quality fats like avocados and those mono and polyunsaturated olives and olive oils and avocado oils and nuts and seeds and things like that, rather than choosing the seed oils and the fried foods and bacon, bacon, processed foods, they’re delicious. But really leaning on those things are actually providing fats that are not going to be that great for you. But if you’re also including a lots of colorful non-starchy vegetables, I think that you can get to a point in that sort of, even if it’s more restrictive dietary pattern, that you are getting a lot of really good quality nutrients. Carnivore diet is people really just focus on eating meat. A lot of times people are choosing really high quality, fairly lean proteins, but sometimes a little more fatty eating, a lot fewer plant foods in general. And what I’m finding when I read a little bit of research that comes out on that kind of dietary program that’s very restricted is that long-term use of the carnivore diet actually is contributing to dysbiosis. So I was looking at some information. So doctor’s data does this test. It’s like the GI 360, I think, and some of what they’re finding is that in a carnivore and many other extreme diets that don’t have a lot of plant food is that their test subjects have low levels of phyla that are actually anti-inflammatory, and they have higher amounts of phyla that are inflammatory. These are like proteobacteria.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:06:50):

So

Sarah Choszczyk (00:06:52):

While it can be useful, especially for people with food sensitivities, to adopt one of these more restricted diets, to really eliminate things that they’re reacting to, a long-term pattern like this can be really tough on your microbiome.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:07:09):

Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know what I think for clarification, let’s go back a little bit and maybe talk about exactly what you mean by carbs, exactly what you mean by fats and even proteins, because sometimes we make assumptions. We’ve been talking about this for a long time, and then to really delineate out what is a carb, what’s the difference between a grain, and I’ll let you speak to that, but especially with the carbs, because many people have an idea that I eat clean, I eat pretty healthy, but they may be still eating grains, which if you’re trying to eat a lot of carb diet or do keto, you can’t do grains. So let’s clarify that a little bit more.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:08:09):

Absolutely. Great idea. So I like to focus a little bit more on whole food, a whole food dietary pattern. So I’m going to start there when we talk about carbohydrates. So carbohydrates, of course, anything with starches, sugar fibers, so tubers, potatoes, roots, really any root vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, things like that. Squash is another example of something that’s a carbohydrate, very rich in carbohydrates. You can have grains, like you said, whole grains, refined grains, those are mostly carbohydrate, lots of different types of fibers in those legumes. And those are beans, so all kinds of beans, lentils, even peanuts or legumes, although peanuts are, they’re kind of the outlier when it comes to legumes.

(00:09:06):

And then of course you have a lot of fibers and different other types of carbohydrates and starches, starches and sugars, things like that in leafy greens and gosh, fruits, different fruits, obviously lots of different sugars and fruits, mostly fructose, but also sucrose, glucose, other kinds of sugars and fruits. So really anything plant-based is going to be made up of lots of carbohydrates, whereas animal protein doesn’t have as many, certainly can be some, especially when you get into dairy. There’s some carbohydrates and dairy, but really when you’re talking about plant food, it’s going to be lots of carbohydrates. And then when you think of things that are more refined, so breads, pastas, crackers, cookies, things like that, those also contain carbohydrates. They made the plants. French fries. Yeah, exactly. So those are all carbohydrates. So proteins, obviously, we have the animal proteins, we have animal flesh meat, we have fish, eggs, very high protein, and dairy can also be very high protein. And then there’s a lot of protein in plant foods. So again, legumes and whole grains, lots of proteins, and we can talk more about high quality or complete proteins versus lower quality proteins. There’s certain plant proteins that are really amazing. They have all the essential amino acids, which are the building blocks that you need to make proteins in your body. When it’s essential, it means that you can’t make it yourself. You have to eat it.

(00:10:48):

So there’s definitely a lot of proteins in the plant world as well. And then fat, and most people know what fat is. There’s fat in animal food, there’s fat in plants, and there’s all kinds of different kinds of fat. So saturated fat will be kind of the more hard, the hard fat animal fat butter, things like that. Lard and then lard. Exactly. And then you have these other fatty acids that are unsaturated. I don’t want to talk about the chemistry of that. It can get kind of overwhelming, but these are things that are usually found mostly in plant foods, seeds, nuts, seeds, olives, things like that. Fish also have some good different kinds of fats in them.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:31):

Yes, essential fats, in

Sarah Choszczyk (00:11:32):

Fact, very much so.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:34):

Yes,

Sarah Choszczyk (00:11:35):

Yes, exactly.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:36):

So before we go on, let’s talk a little bit about seed oils because seed oils on social media are getting this bad wrap, and I had love to hear a little bit more about the differences between seeds and seed oils and which oils are going to be healthy or not healthy. I think that that’s very confusing for a lot of people

Sarah Choszczyk (00:12:00):

For sure. So there is a researcher that I love from Greece. Her name is Dr. Artemis Simopoulos. She was a researcher with the NIH. She just did a podcast with another functional doctor, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, and she’s got a book out, let me see, I have my notes right here. It’s called The Healthiest Diet for You Scientific Aspects. And she’s talking about the Crete diet. She’s done so much research in fats, fatty acids, and so when we’re talking about seed oils and other kinds of vegetable oils and fats, you’re looking mostly at the type of fatty acid, whether it’s an omega fatty acid and omega six fatty acid, omega nine. And again, I don’t want to delve too much into the chemistry of that, but needless to say, these are mono and polyunsaturated fats that usually come from different plant sources. So what we find in a very westernized diet is that we have this high omega six to omega ratio.

(00:13:06):

Omega six fatty acids can be a lot more inflammatory. Omega fatty acids can be anti-inflammatory, a lot less inflammatory. And what Dr. Simopoulos has found after years and years of research is the human body has evolved to be the healthiest that a diet that is kind of a one-to-one ratio omega six to Omega-3. But our western diet is like a 20 to one ratio. And a lot of the reason is that a lot of our processed foods, a lot of our fried foods are fried in corn oil, sunflower safflower, cotton seeds, soybean oil, those are all really high omega six oils. And when we think about inflammation, especially in the realm of chronic conditions, we know that so many of the chronic conditions we’re dealing with are really inflammation driven. So that’s kind of the concern with seed oils and a lot of those that are really high omega six.

(00:14:07):

So Dr. Simopoulos really kind of tries to bring attention to the ones that are higher. Omega-3, the ones that are a little bit better ratio for us to use. So these are like flax oil, chia seed oil, some of the rap seed oils, and then the monounsaturated oils are a little different, but they are really healthy too. Olive oil, macadamia nut hazelnut, avocado oil. So really trying to make sure you’re using these in your cooking so that you get that ratio of omega six to omega a little bit closer to what we’re evolved to be working on.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:14:46):

Then a lot of the research out of Israel from the eighties and nineties, that was the foundational research for body bio to create their products, including balance oil, found that four to one, omega six to omega threes was the right ratio. And who knows, it may be one to one, it may be four to one. I think probably physiologically it may differ from human to human, but somewhere closer to four to one or one-to-one than 20 or 30 to one is going to be in the right direction. So things like the body bio balance oil can be another great way to add to your vegetables to add to your salads as it omega six, Omega-3, four to one ratio product. And what Dr. Patricia Kane would always teach would be that we can make things like oleic acid, which is mostly in olive oil and avocado oil, but we can’t make those essential fatty acids, those sixes and those threes, and so we really do need to get them from the diet.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:15:59):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And fish, we always hear, oh yeah, eating fish is really important for omega threes. And I know there’s a lot of concern with mercury for sure. And microplastics. And microplastics, I mean and everything. So really making sure that you’re sourcing cold water, wild caught fish as much as possible. And also just there’s a little bit of a balancing act. If you’re fairly healthy and you’re eating well and you’re exercising, you’re doing all the things, is it more important to completely avoid fish because you’re concerned about mercury or is it more important to have some fish, know that you’re going to be consuming some mercury, but also know that you’re going to be getting those really good omega fatty acids that will reduce inflammation and maybe even help your system in general deal with that mercury that you’re going to get. A lot of fish has selenium and things like that that can actually potentially help you with that mercury insult.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:17:06):

And I think that that’s where striving for moderation is really important. That’s going to be, and moderation and diversity, I mean obviously that’s going to be the best for a microbiome. For those people who have to eat restricted diets, please take what we’re saying and understand that the goal is not for you to eat the carnivore of diet forever, but to eventually get to the point where you can add diversity. I agree with you. I think that eating sushi every day would be a really poor choice for health, but having an occasional wild caught salmon, if that’s something that you like and enjoy would be healthy. Yes.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:18:03):

And it goes back to the question that you asked at the very beginning. You had mentioned thinking critically, and it really is about, there’s a lot of nutrition information out there, and I am just giving you more as well. And you have to understand that it is a ton of information. There is lots of really good, lots of really good info, lots of scientifically backed info. And I’m not saying that science is the end all be all, but that is the environment where scientists are trying to really look at specific variables and they’re trying to control for other variables, and it’s a learning process. So they find that eggs are good one day and then they find something that maybe not so good the next day and then the next day it’s like, oh, actually, maybe they are okay. I know it’s frustrating. I know it is. Science is not about finding the only one answer. It’s about finding the best answer with the information we have right now. So as you kind of read some of the information out there, listen to people talk about nutrition, it’s a good idea to take a step back, look at some different resources, think about it critically, listen to your intuition, listen to how your body feels when you eat a certain food. Take all of that information and then decide for yourself what is best.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:25):

Yes. So for example, Nikki said in the chat that she made some wild caught salmon and the smell just grossed her out so much she can’t eat it anymore, and it’s okay then that’s not your thing, right? There are plenty of other healthy ways to get these nutrients in you that we’re going to cover, and could we reduce the reactivity probably over time? Sounds like you need EMDR potentially for that traumatic experience. I’m sorry, I’m not joking, but I’m not making light of your experience. I’m simply saying it sounds pretty traumatic. And yes, there are definitely things that can help, and there are other ways to get these nutrients in. So just because we say fish is good or eggs are bad or bacon is bad, doesn’t mean that you need to take that a hundred percent,

Sarah Choszczyk (00:20:32):

Right? I mean, if you want to lean more toward eating some freshly ground flax seeds or taking some flax oil or the body balance oil or some walnuts, those all have wonderful omega threes. I struggle with fish too. I know it’s good for me. I get fish from Alaska, my family goes up there, and so I just try to figure out ways that I can eat it. I don’t eat it as often as I should. I know, but I try. So I totally get that. And to your point really quickly, Kelly, there is a lot of anxiety around eating and around food and around nutrition. So I do think especially with folks who are having reactions, I know we may get a little bit more into kind of food sensitivities and stuff, but everyone that I speak to who has food sensitivities also deals with anxiety and it makes perfect sense to me.

(00:21:24):

I have also had food sensitivities, and when you eat something new or when you sit down to a meal, you don’t know what’s in it, it can really cause an actual nervous system reaction. And over time, that just continues to sort of put stress on you. So you do sort of develop this post-traumatic stress response and things like EMDR sometimes are required for that. I know you’ve done a lot of work and a lot of talking to people about nervous system retraining and vagus nerve stimulation. All of that is very, very useful for people who are dealing with food sensitivities. And a lot of times when I talk to patients who are having food sensitivities will also touch on things they can do to calm themselves down before they eat and while they’re eating because it’s not a disconnected thing. It all works together.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:22:14):

Absolutely, yes. We have to be in a parasympathetic state for our digestive tracks to work properly. And if we’re stressed out eating on the run, shoving the food in our car or in 10 minutes in between patients, guys sometimes have to do, yeah, got to take a few breaths, got to calm down, try and shift into parasympathetic as much as possible so that those nutrients can be adequately digested and absorbed so that we can have the benefits of all the food that we are eating. So let’s talk a little bit about food sensitivities and how you might help somebody who’s struggling, whether they know if they have food sensitivities or not.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:23:06):

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it’s something more and more people are experiencing, and like you said, sometimes people don’t know if it’s a food sensitivity. And so earlier when I talked about a carnivore diet being a very extreme, but potentially a very useful elimination diet, that’s kind of the first part sometimes to helping to handle a food sensitivity. Actually the first part is trying to figure out what it is your sensitive to. So of course there’s tests, lots of different tests. Not all the tests are perfect, but they can be really helpful in figuring out what direction to go. A lot of times what I have found helpful in a lot of patients and clients is just starting to be mindful of what they’re eating in connection to how they’re feeling. So sometimes that’s just writing down or somehow keeping track of what they’re eating day to day for a few days to a week, and also how they’re feeling.

(00:24:05):

I try to help clients keep that from getting too obsessive. That’s another part of the food sensitivity sort of mental health juxtaposition. It starts to become a little bit of, it’s like too much, but it’s also very helpful just to be aware of what it is you’re eating and then how you’re feeling. And then we can go through it together and see if there are patterns. If a pattern emerges and you find one or two things or even a handful of things that you’re like, I’m pretty sure I’m reacting to these, then the idea is just you cut those out as much as possible. And gold standard of courses completely cut those out couple weeks, several weeks, a month, six weeks, depends on how many things we’re trying to cut out and really what the issue is. And then introducing, that’s the part that gets missed a lot is the reintroduction part, especially if someone is dealing with a lot of food sensitivities or they seem to react to everything.

(00:25:07):

So we try something like the carnivore diet, it’s getting them back to where they can reintroduce. So elimination is really just trying to get your system to calm down, get your immune system to calm down, get your gut to calm down, and to heal a little bit, and then work a little bit on that nervous system part really so you’re feeling safe, so you’re feeling ready to reintroduce. And then the reintroduction part is very systematic. It can seem really slow. I mean, it’s very hard to do. So if any of you out there have tried the reintroduction and you’ve come across frustration because it’s just so slow, I feel you. I totally feel you. But it’s also the most important part to not only figure out what you might still be reacting to, but then also to get that diversity like Dr. Kelly said, and do it in a way that your system feels safe and you’re not sort of exacerbating issues again. So the reintroduction is usually for a lot of people, it’s like a few bites to maybe one small portion of the food, and then you wait a day or two, see how things are going. Sometimes reactions can be delayed, so you just wait a little while you eat, the things are safe, and if you don’t notice a reaction, then you try it again with the same food. So that’s why it’s sort of takes a long time. It could take you a week to 10 days to reintroduce one thing back in,

(00:26:39):

And that’s okay. And if you do end up having reactions, I really like to encourage people not to look at that food and say, I can’t eat this ever again. Put it on a list that says, save for later, try again later. Not now. Not yet. Not yet.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:26:56):

Yes. So if you were counseling somebody and they didn’t know, they really didn’t know and they just want to start somewhere, but they’re eating everything, what might you suggest they take out first? What are the most problematic foods or food groups that you see in most people?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:27:17):

The first thing I would actually ask them is what do they feel like they cannot live without or what do they feel like they could live without? So a lot of what I’m finding in just working with people in general and the approach that I take is figuring out where people are, where they are in their head, where they are in this place that’s very unknown, and meet them there. So I try to ask them, where are you? What do you think about an elimination diet? How does it make you feel? What do you envision? And then we may talk about the main things people can be sensitive to. So we’re talking about gluten, potentially dairy, especially cow dairy. Sometimes people couldn’t be okay with goat, but not so much with cow sheep. Maybe eggs are an issue. Sometimes people find them pretty reactive to eggs.

(00:28:13):

Peanuts really common allergen allergies is a little different than sensitivities, as I’m sure you’ve talked about before. Sometimes people just have generally issues with some of those more hearty fibers. I mean, if they’re eating a pretty standard western diet, they may have a hard time with whole foods like beans and things like that. So we really try to take out that major stuff, gluten, dairy, see if eggs are an issue. Sometimes reducing things like grains and legumes can be helpful for especially digestive symptoms. I don’t love the idea of being off of those forever, but it just depends on the person. So things like that, maybe a start, but really if they’re able to just keep track of what they’re eating for at least three days and then we can look and see what they’re able to and willing to try getting rid of, and then we kind of go from there.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:29:12):

That makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I did when I was trying to sort this out too, is that I would make very simple meals. So I would have, for example, chicken, broccoli and rice. And if I had a reaction, then I would try chicken broccoli and a sweet potato. It sounds super boring, but I figured out that rice was a problem. Rice is rarely a problem for, but because I did that little experiment and was willing to eat similar meals, one dinner one day, one dinner the next day, it was an aha moment. I feel crappy and itchy when I eat rice. And so then I could put that on my not now list.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:30:01):

Do you recall how long it took you to sort of do that pattern before you got to your whole list?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:30:10):

Good question. I think it was probably a couple of weeks to a month. I wasn’t doing it scientifically. It was more like, Hmm, I don’t feel well after I eat that meal. I wonder what it was, and then slowly start to piece it together. I think if I had been more structured, I probably could have figured it out sooner than that, but

Sarah Choszczyk (00:30:34):

It sounds pretty structured to me.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:30:39):

And then doing the food sensitivity testing that we do at the office through our colleague Dr. Ingles, he confirmed everything I knew I had a problem with. It was amazing. And then we’re able to offer immunotherapy, which is fantastic. So not now, not yet for some of these foods, but some of them people get back and that’s really encouraging. Have

Sarah Choszczyk (00:31:06):

You been able to introduce some of those foods back from your list?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:10):

Yes. So I was mold exposed. That’s when I developed all these food sensitivities. And it turns out that there’s a relationship amongst phenols with phenol compounds, which are in rice peas and almonds. And so I have issues with all of those things, but the immunotherapy that I did with Dr. Ingels enabled me to eat Now, rice and peas, almonds, I’m still a little allergic to, it’s actually a true IgE allergy, but I can eat gluten-free products with almonds in them just as long as I don’t eat too much.

(00:31:51):

And the more I do the immunotherapy, the easier it is to tolerate. I wouldn’t drink almond milk. I really can’t do a keto product with lots and lots of almond. I tend to avoid that. But yeah, I’ve been able to reintroduce some of the other, just for those of you who don’t know, think about the pepper family. So that’s your peppers, your potatoes, your eggplants, and your tomatoes. There’s a phenolic in there called piperine. And so oftentimes when you have reactions to tomatoes or peppers, you’re going to also have reactions to the ones in that similar family. Not all the time, but sometimes.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:32:39):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s really fascinating. And you perfectly show that it’s a complex issue. You do have these immune system modulated allergies and sensitivities, and then there are some that seem to be, it’s almost like they’re nervous system modulated. So folks who certainly, some of your patients that I’ve spoken to not a lot shows up and then they do the testing that we get from Dr. Ingels and a bunch of stuff shows up and it’s like, okay, well that’s interesting. That sort of says to me either their immune system is totally being just subjugated, whatever, or it’s really their immune system or their nervous system. It’s something where there’s something in there that feels unsafe, and then it’s maybe causing mast cell activation or histamine intolerant histamine intolerance. Absolutely. So it can be really complicated, and if you want to really get down to the bottom of it, doing it just like Dr. Kelly, that can definitely be a way. And she had a really good amount of protein. She was eating chicken. She had some broccoli, which has a lot of really good compounds in it, a lot of green, all the lovely things in broccoli. And then she was eating some carbohydrates as well. So she had the things that her body needed for a short amount of time and she reintroduced as needed. That’s a perfect example of a great, actually very systematic elimination and reintroduction.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:34:17):

Thanks, Sarah. Okay, so if you have questions, folks, please drop them in the chat. Sarah and I are going to continue talking. I’m sorry, drop them in the q and a, not the chat, the q and a section, and we’ll get to them at the end. I did want to pick your brain a little bit about ketones and carnivore. So I recently did an organic acid test and it said that I actually don’t make beta hydroxybutyrate right now, which is really disturbing. And then I got a lumen. Have you seen those lumen things?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:35:03):

Yeah, yeah, I have.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:35:05):

So I got a lumen and it says the same thing. All I do is burn carbs, I can’t, can’t get into ketosis. I’m not making ketones right now. So I’ve been taking some exogenous ketones, trying to get my lumen numbers a little bit better. Very interesting. I think it has to do with the current mold exposure that I’m experiencing, and maybe we can do a little research and circle back on that topic, but very interesting. So even if I was eating keto, and at this point I’ve been low carb for a long time, and what I described as kind of what I eat, a protein, a green vegetable, a slightly starchy vegetable like squash or sweet potatoes, most would be carrots or corn. That would be the most kind of starchy vegetable that I would eat and not getting into ketosis at all. I

Sarah Choszczyk (00:36:12):

Wonder if that small amount of starch is just enough to kick you out.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:15):

Yeah, it might be. I just have to do a lot more work in order to get into ketosis than many people could be.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:36:25):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s probably why there are so many, like I said, so many subsets of keto because there are some keto that allow for 20 grams of carbs, which is pretty low. But then some people, even with 20 grams of carbs, which is enough in what, a little bit of pet sweet potato or some oats, that’ll just kick you right out of ketosis.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:48):

Yeah. So I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit more about ketosis or carnivore or shall we move on to healthy eating for the holidays?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:36:56):

Let’s move on to healthy eating. I definitely will have worked a little bit with people on keto. I have noticed that a lot of the people who are doing keto for just for weight loss or for helping with their metabolic flexibility, they don’t feel as well when they are in true ketosis. So I don’t usually make the recommendation all that often if they’re really concerned about their metabolic flexibility. We talk about modulating their carbohydrates and their other macronutrients sort of in a little bit of a pattern. We change things up a little bit. My big concern with doing a long-term keto diet and staying ketosis for a long time, and I know are really, there’s some really good people who are working with keto on things like certain types of cancer and on autism and things like that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:57):

Neurodegenerative disorders.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:37:58):

Yeah, neurodegenerative disorders. The concern I have is, so I pulled this article, it’s from 2015, it’s not super recent, but the quarterly review of biology, the team actually looked at, and this is just one study, so again, don’t take one study and plan your whole life around it, but this is one study. They looked at some data, archeological, anthropological, genetic, things like that. And what they found was that they sort of connected the development of cooking, especially cooking carbohydrates in to the size, the expansion of the size of the human brain and the human brain uses what something like 60% of our blood glucose. It is so hungry and carbohydrates are the most efficient way to make energy and to get glucose to our brain. Certainly as people have seen who are doing keto and stuff like that, you can make really good energy out of fat, out of proteins.

(00:39:07):

It’s just a little more, you have to expend a little more energy, especially with fats. So what this team found was really that our ancestors would’ve been readily able to find tubers, they would’ve been able to find fruits and probably some legumes as they were foraging and they learned how to cook, and they started to develop these salivary amylase. So amylase is an enzyme in the saliva in your mouth that starts to break down carbohydrates, which just points to the amazing efficiency of the system of our body to take carbohydrates and really suck those of the energy it needs to power our giant brain. And I think other Simeon, they have a third of the amount of salivary amylase, something like that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:39:59):

Oh, interesting.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:40:00):

Yeah. So I just find that very interesting, especially when we are talking about things like ketosis and keto and carnivore and things like that where there’s a pattern where there’s not a lot of carbohydrates being eaten, especially not a lot of those starchy carbohydrates. It’s just interesting. It’s something to think about. I definitely encourage people, again, to just kind of step back and kind of look at the whole forest and make decisions based on all of that information.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:33):

It all comes back to personalized choices and what your health goals are, what your body is capable of doing, and how do we move the needle if you’re trying to maintain your health or improve your health and working with a nutritionist health coach can be very beneficial if you are struggling or if you have lots of questions. Okay. Let’s talk about all the me things coming in the next few weeks and months.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:41:06):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Holiday time. It is so complicated, isn’t it? It’s wonderful, it’s celebratory, but it helps be kind of stressful. So my general thought, this is for myself, and a lot of people find that this is really useful, not just during the holidays, but every day throughout your whole life, having this sort of 80 20 rule or 85 15 rule or 90 10, whatever makes sense for you, where 80 to 90% of the time you are on your program, you are eating, the foods are nourishing that make you feel good, that you feel safe with, you’re doing your exercise, you’re doing your stress reduction, you’re doing all this stuff, and then the rest of the time you’re doing things that bring you joy. You’re having a little pie because you’re with your family or you’re with your loved ones and it makes your heart sore.

(00:41:59):

And that’s obviously for those who are generally doing okay, they’re not dealing with major food sensitivities or chronic conditions that can really, really get in the way. But even in those cases, sometimes you can have a little bit of leeway. There are so many amazing recipes out there, websites of people who are dealing with the same thing you are dealing with, and they are figuring out alternatives and ways to make the things they love at holiday meals with ingredients that are going to be okay for folks with histamine intolerance or food sensitivities, things like that. So really looking for those resources can be helpful. I like to say pick your parties, pick your battles. It’s hard to say no during this time of the year, but that can be kind of freeing and it can, that can be an act of self-care as well. So if you know that doing a big family holiday dinner is going to be stressful because of the food or the political thing going on or whatever it is, it is absolutely okay to say, I’m not feeling my best right now, so I’m going to give myself some time to heal and recover, but let’s go bowling together or let’s have some coffee, or let’s go for a walk.

(00:43:26):

There’s definitely alternatives to the big food-centric stressful events. And no is also a complete answer, so I give permission, not that I need to give you permission, but sometimes

Kelly McCann, MD (00:43:41):

We need to

Sarah Choszczyk (00:43:41):

Hear

Kelly McCann, MD (00:43:41):

That we can take that, right? You can,

Sarah Choszczyk (00:43:46):

Yeah. And if you want to do, I just had a holiday thing myself here at my other job this morning, and so I brought something that I knew I liked and is healthy and is tasty. I shared it with my coworkers and they really liked it, and I got to enjoy their company and have a great time. So you can always bring food to share and that will be okay for you as well. Yeah, and there’s those little things too, like staying hydrated when we might imbibe an alcohol a little bit more than usual. There is a product I just found out about called Z Biotics. Have you heard of this?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:44:37):

No.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:44:38):

Z biotic. Yeah. So it’s a little probiotic drink. It has a strain of probiotic. So when you drink alcohol, it gets broken down to acid and that hangs out in your liver and your liver kind of takes care of it, and it hangs out in your gut and it hangs out into your gut until you excrete it. And that acid aldehyde is what makes you feel like crap the next day. So this Z biotic is this little probiotic. Have an alcoholic drink will actually go into your gut and will hang out there. And when the acid acetaldehyde is in your gut, it’ll eat it all up and it actually helps you a little bit. It helps kind of not feel so bad the next day. I wouldn’t necessarily say drink all you want to, but a bottle of wine and your antibiotic. But if you know you’re going to be going to your company Christmas party and you usually have a few glasses of wine and you don’t feel so good for the next day or a few days after that, that may be something you try along with hydrating,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:45:41):

Yes,

Sarah Choszczyk (00:45:41):

Eating. If you eat,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:45:44):

Michelle, just put it in the chat. So thank you, Michelle. There’s the link if you want that. The other thing that I love for alcohol, I know we sound like a bunch of drinkers, but over the years drinking alcohol has become less and less and less and less and less a part of my life, but a glass of wine at Christmas dinner would be really nice, or Thanksgiving dinner. So enzalase by master supplements is another amazing digestive enzyme that also has this wondrous capacity to metabolize alcohol. So maybe between the Z biotic and the enzalase. Yeah, I can tell you all little stories. So the first time I was given Enza, I was at a medical conference, A4M American Academy for the Advancement of Medicine or something like that, anti-aging medicine, anti-aging medicine, and in Vegas. And I was with the owner of the company. There’s a bunch of eight different doctors at the dinner table, and he passes out two enzalase for everyone and starts pouring the wine. He loves wine. And I had five glasses of wine that night. This was probably 10 years ago now. So my liver worked a little bit better. The enzalase worked. I was up in my seat in the class the next morning at eight o’clock to listen to the lectures without any adverse effects. And I thought, what was that stuff? Oh my goodness. Normally it was like one or two glasses and I’m done ever since I was in high school. So this was magic.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:47:31):

That’s amazing.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:32):

And a couple weeks later, I was celebrating New Year’s with my then, then boyfriend, now husband, and after about three glasses of wine, I said, here, honey, it’s 1130. We should probably take our enzalase. And by midnight he was sober. And he is like, what was that? Don’t give me that. So now we take it at bedtime, but you can take it when you drink or when you eat. It is a digestive enzyme, so it helps you digest your food. I love it for food sensitivities as well. So enzalase by master supplements a great way, and it is on the, Michelle dropped the link in the chat, so you want to stock up on your enzolace and check out that Z biotic and see if that can help if you happen to have a few glasses of wine. Alright, let’s go back to food.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:48:24):

Awesome. Yeah, that’s great to know. Yeah, so I think the only other thing I can really think about when it comes to when you’re trying to pace yourself for those holiday meals and it’s really easy to overeat, just delicious, delicious food is kind of the same advice I might give anyone really at any time. Sometimes the timing of the different types of food you eat can really help keep you from overeating

(00:48:56):

Because it has to do with satiety has to do with our hunger and our full cues. Sometimes we forget about that stuff when we’re socializing and having fun or when we’re, like you said, eating in the car or eating quickly between patients. So if you eat some of your foods in a certain order, you can actually really feel that satiation that, oh, I’m full. I don’t need to eat anymore. And so eating your protein first, it’s very satiating. And then eating your high fiber like vegetables, and if you’re a whole grain eater, peas or legumes, things like that, those are very high fiber, those are very satiating. And then you can kind of go towards some of your other carbohydrates. You can have a little bit of dessert. And also that, I don’t know who actually came up with this idea way back when, but it was just a smaller plate because very visual. That’s why the whole, my eyes were big in my stomach. Phrase exists. We’re very visual, especially when it’s beautiful food and it’s a special occasion. So just going for a smaller plate, grab a dessert plate, grab a dessert plate, and instead of using the big serving spoon, grab the spoon from your place setting, grab a bite from that one or two of those scoops are like this much rather than a serving spoon, which is this much. So those little tricks you can do

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:25):

With my utensils. I have the regular utensils, and then I have these mini forks and these mini spoons, and I just love them for dessert. So you put it in a little tiny plate and my husband hates it. He’s like, whatcha doing? It takes you forever to eat that. Well, that’s the idea. I want to make it last and make it enjoyable so that I don’t overeat and I just really take it all in. Right, take it all

Sarah Choszczyk (00:50:57):

In. Yeah. Yeah. I love it when you go to a place and they make the desserts in a one bite on a little plate or in a little shot glass.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:51:06):

Yeah,

Sarah Choszczyk (00:51:07):

They’re great. You get just a little taste of something wonderful and you can have maybe two of them and it’s not going to be so much and so heavy that you’re just regretting it later.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:51:20):

Yeah,

(00:51:22):

It is tricky. It’s interesting. Everyone in my family is gluten-free and dairy-free, which makes holiday get togethers much easier because we all know that everything that people will bring or anything that we’re making, everyone can eat it. And then one time I went to a weekend with some friends and I only knew a couple people who were there, and most of the people were not gluten-free and dairy-free, and very little of the food was safe for me to eat. They served spaghetti and pizza and I thought, what planet am I on? So I was given a taste of how challenging it can be when you’re the only person with food sensitivities in a world where people just don’t understand you and are accommodating for you. It is difficult, and I think that what you are sharing, Sarah’s is really important. Being able to say no to events that are not going to be supportive for you and eating first before you go to a holiday party so that you don’t have those temptations or bringing your own food that you know can enjoy. That’s a really smart thing.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:52:59):

And to your point, if you’re already handling a little added for whatever reason, it’s definitely a time to double up on your support network. So whether you do therapy, really talking with your therapist, talking with your supportive and loving family and friends, those people, like you said, who might have the same sensitivities or who at least understand and support you and you’ll know, they’ll ask you, what can I make that you can eat? And most of the time they really want, they really want you to be happy and to have a great time and to feel good doing your nervous system retraining programs or exercises, very, very important during this especially stressful time. So all that self-care stuff you do all the time, double up on it if you can.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:04):

Yeah, I think our inclination when we get busy is to let that stuff slide. And that’s the exact opposite of really what we need to be doing during this busy time is to stop doing our self-care. I was speaking with a friend of mine who recently moved out of the country and it’s been a super bumpy road for her, and she has so many tools and yet she’s been even more busy, even more overwhelmed and is not really doing very well. And so the more that we can preempt the challenges that we might be facing by taking that extra 10 minutes to meditate, going for a walk, reaching out to a friend, booking extra sessions with our therapist, using our vagus nerve devices, or doing an extra round of limbic system work, those things are going to be so supportive for you as you go through the holiday season. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. Shall we take some questions? Yeah, sure. Okay. Let’s see. Can you April April’s ask if we could discuss GLA specifically and why would somebody be low in this? So I am assuming that she’s referring to gamma linoleic acid, which is an omega six fatty acid. So do you have some thoughts on that, Sarah?

Sarah Choszczyk (00:55:53):

You know, I don’t, yeah, I’m not really sure. That may be a little beyond my scope.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:55:59):

Okay. I’ll give it a shot. So we don’t have the fatty acid schematic of how that works, but know that the enzymes that will take alpha linoleic acid to EPA and DHA, I think it’s DHA, and then EPA, your omega side. Then you’ve got your omega side, and then you’ve got your omega six side. So you’ve got linoleic acid and then GLA and arachidonic acid kind of that way. The enzymes that will move the pathway forward are the same. So if you eat too many omega threes, you’re going to use up those enzymes and then you’re going to get a little deficient on the omega six side. And so that may be part of the problem.

(00:57:04):

When we finally realized that the standard American diet was 20 to 30 to one omega, six to omega threes, a lot of the functional practitioners and naturopaths and well healthcare, healthcare practitioners recommended a lot of omega threes in the form of fish oil. And so people were taking high doses of omega threes. You go to your cardiologist, you have triglycerides, everybody gets pharmaceutical grade, omega fatty acids. Lovaza is one of the prescriptions, for example, and that’s oftentimes three and four grams of fish oil. And then you’re getting way, way, way out of balance in terms of the omega six side. So I really do think that the balance oil and paying attention to those other healthy fats, the essential sixes and the healthy omega sixes, and that’s really what the GLA is. So trying to either get that in a supplement form or reduce your omega threes from supplementation would be important.

(00:58:14):

And unfortunately, most of the Omega checks and the commercially available Omega fatty acid testing is not completely accurate. It’s what we can order through Quest LabCorp. But really the gold standard would be a fatty acid profile from Body Bio where they’ll look at the sixes, they’ll look at the nines, they’ll look at the long chain fatty acids, they’ll look at a variety of other markers to see how are your fats, how are you doing with your fats, and what do we need to tweak in order to fix some of ’em. Body bio can offer that test through practitioners who have been doing it for previously, but it’s not as available right now. They’re trying to tweak that. But it gets sent to Johns Hopkins. There’s a special lab at Johns Hopkins that does this testing, so hopefully it will be more widely available again soon.

Sarah Choszczyk (00:59:24):

And so if someone is finding that they are not able to go through that omega six chain and produce gamma linoleic acid, do you know if there are specific symptoms that come from that and syndromes that come from that?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:59:40):

Patricia Kane used to teach that a lot of eczema, psoriasis, skin issues were GLA deficiencies. And so I can’t say that I have medical literature to back up that statement. We’d have to go search on that. But when I find that people have low cholesterol or their omega check is really a high, too high, I’ll drastically reduce the fish oil and then add in some of the balanced oil and some of the evening primrose oil. So evening primrose oil is probably the best oil option for supporting that GLA. You can also do barrage oil, but I happen to prefer the evening primrose oil. Great. How much cruciferous vegetables do I need to offset the effects of microplastics? Great question. Roundup.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:00:56):

Oh my gosh. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah, eat as much as you can. I would say, gosh, it’s a world that we live in now. So I think, again, being careful not to miss the forest for the trees. Again, I don’t want to negate the fact that we are eating micro nanoplastics. That’s a serious problem. But really looking at not just cruciferous vegetables, but all kinds of different things. Like really, again, looking at that very diverse diet is really important. But yeah, a bunch go crazy as long as you are okay with them not sensitive to them. I mean, they’re good for a lot of things, lots of great compounds and crucifer vegetables for lots of different, different benefits.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:01:54):

Absolutely. Yeah, I don’t think that unless you’re sensitive to cruciferous vegetables and to the sulfur and the cruciferous vegetables, in which case probably I would suggest more meidum and maybe we’d have to work on what are the root causes for all those sensitivities. But unfortunately, thinking that cruciferous vegetables are going to clean up the microplastics, I don’t think that there’s literature to support that at this point in time. It is very difficult to get out the microplastics in the nano and especially the nanoplastics, unless we’re doing plasmapheresis for people, which is really not plausible for the planet to exchange out their blood. So we really, really need to work on avoidance as much as possible in order to reduce our exposures. When on a limited diet, is it best to eat small amounts of foods you react to in order to improve your food diversity? That’s a good question, Kathy.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:03:01):

That’s a really good question. Really good question. So again, I would go back to the systematic reintroduction. There is certainly a fine line between eating something and having a reaction that is not going to be good for you, that’s going to create inflammation and a further nervous system response that you don’t want to have. And the other side of that is being what we call hormesis, which is like this little bit of, it’s a little stressor, but it’s a healthy stressor and it’s kind of hard to find where that balance is. So it is very individualized. So for you, it may be one thing that you know react to or you used to react to and you haven’t had it for a while trying a little bit. And if you feel generally okay then maybe, and you feel safe enough trying it again, I think of beans, right?

(01:03:50):

I mean, a lot of people say beans give me gas, so I just don’t eat them that often. The reason beans give you gas is probably because your microbiome isn’t really set up to deal with the oligosaccharides and beans. If you ate a little bit of beans a little consistently, your microbiome is an amazing thing. It will shift, it will start producing phyla that can deal with the oligosaccharides, and you probably won’t have a lot, if any gas anymore. So again, you kind of have to work within what you’re able to do. Certainly work with a nutritionist or a dietician or some other nutrition professional who can really meet you where you are and help you navigate that reintroduction. And yeah, that’s all I could say about that, I guess.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:37):

No, and that’s really great advice. I think that it’s easy to get trapped in black and white like, oh, that food gave me a problem. I can’t ever eat it again. But to know that there are ways to reintroduce things in very small amounts sparingly, you can make some shifts. And the other thing that I will let people know about too is that we can do immunotherapy. So essentially when you’re eating small amounts of a food sparingly, you’re doing the same thing as immunotherapy where we take dilute doses of the things that you’re reacting to and administering that to the immune system and saying, okay, immune system, this little tiny bit is okay. So whether that’s sublingual immunotherapy drops that you put on your tongue, or immunotherapy such as low dose allergy therapy, which was designed for use in the sixties and seventies by the grandfathers of functional medicine. So these were the doctors who were seeing a multiple chemical sensitivity, all the people who are sick in the sixties and seventies. And they realized that if you went to an allergist, you could only get treatments for allergies, IgE allergies, which is fantastic for those people who have allergies. But for all the rest of us who have food sensitivities and intolerances, it’s not helpful.

(01:06:16):

So these practitioners got together and created LDA, and what they did is they took all the major food groups that people have reactions to that we’ve been talking about. So gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs, corn nuts, citrus, et cetera. And they put them into one mix. They took all these antigens, put them into one mix, and then they diluted it out so that it’s not quite homeopathic, but close. And then they took all the environmental things, dogs, cats, dust trees, grasses, molds, et cetera, put them into one mix, diluted it out. And that can be administered either intradermally or sublingually, usually once every two months to help reduce the reactivity. Amazing, amazing. So that in combination with an elimination diet and a slow reintroduction can be transformative for people’s health.

(01:07:16):

If you are looking for a provider who does LDA, I would suggest going to the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. That’s aaemonline.org. Michelle, I’m sure will put it in the chat for us. Since many of you are not from local, hopefully there is a provider in your area. You can also encourage your provider to consider joining and getting training in LDA because it is super simple and it can be really transformative for people. So I just wanted to put that little plug in there. Okay. Let’s keep going. What type of food sensitivity testing do you recommend? Start with that, and then have you done the Biome site stool test?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:08:10):

So food testing, like I said earlier, there isn’t a gold standard for food sensitivity testing. I will say that a lot of the immune mediated food sensitivities, you have an IgG test, things like that those are pretty good if you are dealing with an immune mediated or modulated, whatever, food sensitivity. If it’s not, or if it’s a little more, I don’t know, what would you say? Subtle. Doing something like the ELECTRODERMAL screening like Dr. Kelly does, like Dr. Ingels does. That can be really helpful too. Dr. Kelly, will you mind talking about how does it work? I still tell– I thought so too. People are like, how does it work? I was like, well, here’s how it works. But I’m not exactly sure what the reaction is. That’s why I feel like it’s a nervous system. It’s a nervous reaction. It’s almost like an electrical impulse, which comes from our nervous system. So it is a really interesting test. But yeah,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:09:18):

It is an interesting test. I call it woo woo in a box because it’s not FDA approved. So let’s think about our bodies as we’re electrical beings. We have different frequencies, other things in the environment have frequencies. So for example, you’ve all heard of the idea of a opera singer who can shatter glass with her voice if she hits the right note in such a way that it matches the frequency of that organism or of that glass. It shatters it. There is a form of treatment for Lyme disease and other infections called RIFE. Rife works on a very similar concept where there’s a frequency of the organism, and if you are able to dial in that frequency with a machine that generates that and you place it near the person, it will destroy the organism.

(01:10:34):

My sense about the electrodermal screening is kind of like that. And when I went to see him and he was testing my food, so as I said, I had figured out all my food sensitivities, gluten, dairy, soy, corn, eggs, nuts, citrus, peanuts, almonds, apples, tomatoes, peppers, and then the rice and the peas. So I knew all my foods and I walked into his office and he literally has you hold a metal rod and then runs a current through the body and then connects the current to a meridian point on your fingernail tip and will run that frequency of that food through the body. And then the computer generates a sound that reflects if it’s good or bad. So if it’s good, the sound is like, and if it’s bad, the sound goes. And so all those foods that my body did not agree with my body, it went, it’s not good. And so that’s how the test works. It’s a little woo woo in a box. It’s

Sarah Choszczyk (01:12:02):

Like a circuit. When the circuit is complete. It’s okay when the circuit’s broken.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:09):

Yeah, exactly. So for what that’s worth, electrodermal screening is not very common. There may be some interesting practitioners out there that are doing it. And for our patients, we’re able to use Dr. Ingels, Darren Ingels, who’s down the street as our lab. He also takes patients if you’re interested. And I think that other older chiropractors or sometimes naturopaths might have this as part of their practice if people want to look for it. But food sensitivity testing is really tough. I’ve done all the different food sensitivity testing on myself and my patients. I remember I got a lab back one time and the primary food that it said I had a problem with cashews and I eat cashew milk yogurt on a fairly regular basis. That wasn’t accurate. So I think a combination of your own intuition, your own experience and observation combined with some of these tests can be the most useful way to proceed for the stool test. Do you have any comments about the stool test?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:13:36):

I haven’t used that particular one. What I will say about stool tests, especially if you’re looking at specifically the diversity of your microbiome, you have to remember that a lot of the bacterial phyla in your microbiome are anaerobic. And so when you have a stool sample, all of those are going to die because it’s going to hit the air. So it’s not always going to be accurate unless you can get a stool sample that is if you go to a facility that can get your stool sample, and it can always be done in this very, very tightly controlled environment. It can be handy. You can look for things like secretory IGA and other inflammatory markers. You can look at zonulin and see how your intestinal permeability is. There’s definitely things about most stool tests, including the biome, including the doctor’s data, GI 360 that I think I mentioned earlier is a great test. I think any of those tests can be useful information as long as you are not building your entire life around one single test. If you certainly get a couple different ones, which I know is not always accessible to people, sometimes a little combination of data can be really helpful. And then like Dr. Kelly said, your intuition paying attention to the cues of your body, the communication that your body is really trying to get through to you.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:14:54):

Yes, yes. Stool testing is not quite ready for primetime. And one of the reasons that I say that is I attended a microbiome conference hosted by Dr. Sabine Hasan, who has a full sequencing genomic stool testing lab outside of Malibu, and she actually invited one person who works for a governmental organization whom I have never heard of called the National Standards of Technology and Regulation. No, no, something like that. National Institute of Standards and Technology, sorry, nist, NIST. And they actually did a split sample of seven different commercially available stool tests. So what they did is they had a thousand people who were omnivores and a thousand people who were vegans, and they submitted stool to samples to nist and they homogenized those stool samples. They put them all together and they came up with a standard of a vegan diet in America stool sample, and they came up with an omnivore American stool sample. So this is the standard. This is the branch of the government that comes up with standards for everything, standards for screws, standards for certain kinds of materials that we use in building, and they are very important. I had never heard of them anyway. So now they have this standardized stool for omnivores and vegans and the American culture, and they split sampled them. They sent them three samples to seven different stool labs, these same exact samples, and none of those labs got it correct.

(01:17:05):

They were not reproducible, they were not accurate to each other. So unfortunately, the commercially available stool tests are not great, not at this time. So it may be fascinating, they could certainly get some of your information correct. But even some of the commercial labs, and they weren’t looking at commercial labs like doctor’s data, which I highly recommend. I mean, doctor’s data and denova I think are probably the best stool testing options for functional labs. They’re still not fantastic, as Sarah said, those cultures, and you’re missing a lot of things when you do a culture. And if you watch my interview with Rick Martin on MicroGen DX, this will make a lot more sense because when we’re doing next generation sequencing, we can actually find things. But most of these labs are doing culture and maybe PCR, so they’re only as good as what you’re looking for. So that’s my long-winded spiel on stool testing. I’m sorry everyone.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:18:18):

That’s very good information.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:18:20):

Okay, let’s go back to Jennifer. She asked, do you think it’s important to try and eat eggs? I don’t love the taste of them. I cannot eat a lot of them, and I’ve been wondering if eating them once a week would really make a difference. I can try and find a way to prepare them. What do you think?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:18:38):

Well, I would love to know what the rest of your dietary pattern looks like. Jennifer, if you’re eating a pretty diverse diet, you probably don’t need to have eggs if you don’t like them. If it’s the only source of protein that does not give you pain or skin issues or digestive issues, then there may be a way to try to find a way to, like you said, put them in other foods so that you don’t really taste them

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:07):

Right. The other thing is choline, which is in the yolk. That’s probably the highest source of choline in our diet, and we need that choline for our brains, for our cell membranes. I’m sure many of you have heard me talk about phosphatidylcholine and Body Bio PC So egg yolks are really a good source of that choline, and yes, you can try and you could also try other sources, but if eggs, if it’s a texture problem, if it’s a taste problem, that is a little bit trickier to get around. Okay.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:19:52):

And supplementation too. I mean, there are certainly people out there who have been eating on carnivore diet for a very long time. Of course, they would’ve died from scurvy years ago if they had not been supplementing. Is it the best way to get your nutrients? No, probably not. Can you eat food and get all your nutrients that you need without supplement? Probably not. Probably not. So if you cannot deal with eggs at all and you don’t really feel like you can eat other things like liver or fish or other things that have some choline, then supplementing certainly an option.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:20:33):

Yes. All phenols have high histamine or is that an individual issue?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:20:42):

All phenols have high histamine.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:20:46):

Yeah, I’m not sure what she means by phenols. So maybe we’ll move on. And maybe Carol, you can clarify what diet for people with histamine intolerance, oxalate issues and need to be on low FODMAPs. Would the carnivore diet be best? This is from Christopher.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:21:06):

Okay. Gosh, Christopher. Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on there. It’s very complex and I recognize that that is a tough place to be. I don’t know that one specific dietary pattern that we’ve talked about or that’s out there might be the one. You may have to look at specific foods that are safe for you, foods that don’t cause reactions, things like that. So obviously looking at low histamine is going to be helpful. Dr. Kelly has a good low histamine, histamine conscious food list with some recipes. I did write that, but I’m not just plugging myself. Sarah wrote, I did well. I took it from a lot of good information that’s already out there on people who’ve done a lot of research on this, so I’m not going to at all take credit for all of that. Same thing with oxalates. Oxalates are a tough thing especially, and other what we call antinutrients in plant food. If you know for sure that oxalates are an issue, then that’s definitely something to work on, reducing a lot of good information about oxalates. Sally Norton has a whole book on oxalates. I can’t remember the name of her book right now. Toxic Super Foods. Yeah.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:23):

Yes, toxic Superfoods. That’s it.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:22:25):

Yeah. If you don’t know for sure that your symptoms are from oxalates though, I would try to get a little bit more clear on that before you just start avoiding things like oxalates. Same with FODMAPs. So here’s the thing with FODMAPs, and for those who don’t know, they’re basically starches that are very difficult to digest. Sometimes they can create a lot of digestive symptoms and discomfort in people who have things like overgrowth, small bowel overgrowth, things like that. The thing with FODMAPs is reducing them can be very helpful in reducing your symptoms. And sometimes that’s just what you need for quality of life and for your mental health, but you’re also missing an awful lot of really good nutrients. So what I learned when I went and got my master’s in nutrition was that along with whatever treatment you’re doing for the overgrowth or the IBS or whatever it is, also reducing your FODMAPs for a little while and then doing that reintroduction piece may be helpful so that you are getting some of those soluble fibers and things that will help diversify your microbiota and push out the overgrowth, the things that are going out of control.

(01:23:44):

So working with someone to help you move along that continuum so that you’re not on such a restricted diet for such a long time. And again, there may be a point where you feel safe enough to start reintroducing some things. You may get to that point where you’re like, you have a little bit of discomfort or a little bit of, I don’t feel quite perfect, but I don’t feel terrible. And that may be that sort of training your system or training your microbiota to sort of adjust to some of those nutrients that you’re not used to, but that may not be where you are right now.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:23):

Great answer. Okay, next question. Is a four to one ratio omega six to Omega-3, the optimal ratio. If someone has a ratio of one-to-one or less on testing, do they need to stop fish oil or even fish if they have IgG reactions to lots of nuts and seeds? Can they get omega six up with a diet or do they need supplementation? What’s the best supplement for omega sixes and should it be omega six only and not a blend? That was a mouthful. Thank you for sharing that question.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:24:59):

Question. Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing I would say is that there’s a lot of questions there, and you’ll definitely want to be working with someone, with a doctor, with a nutritionist, maybe both if you’re not already. So if you’re sensitive to all nuts and seeds, then probably supplementation is a good idea. Dr. Kelly just talked about evening primrose oil being a really, really good option for omega sixes. For people who have, I don’t remember if this was one of the questions, but people who have issues with fish oils or for supplementation for omega threes, sometimes going straight to the special pro, resolving mediators can be helpful, especially if you’re trying to resolve inflammation, that’s what omega threes turn into. So that may be an option. But yeah, in any case where you’re really sensitive to something and you can’t get that nutrient through your food supplementation for a while is probably going to be necessary. I don’t know if I answered all the questions

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:56):

There. That’s okay. There was a lot. I think that’s great. We have a few more questions to go and not much time. And then I did mention the balance oil. So the Body Bio Balance Oil I think can be really helpful as well as I’ve been liking Xymogen’s Mono Pure. So if you have a sensitivity, you have fishy burps with your fish oil. The way that they’ve constructed the Mono Pure, which is a fish oil by Xymogen, can be helpful for people who may not be able to tolerate some of the other fish oils. Let’s talk about avocado oil. I’ve heard that avocado oil is often processed with solvents. Do you know of any good quality avocado oils?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:26:48):

Yeah, that’s also a concern with canola oil sometimes. So what I will say is if you’re concerned about the way something is being processed is really going for an organic option, the organic label is very, very tightly regulated, which means, well, lots of different things. So for a production plant or a farmer or a producer or an organization to be labeled organic, they have to follow these certain very tight regulations. And a lot of that is not using any GMO, which is great if you want to be able to eat things like soy or if you want to be able to use things like canola oil, non GMO. A lot of the times they can’t use the same solvents and chemicals and things that a non-organic producer or a farmer can use. So going with an organic avocado oil is probably going to be your best bet, in my opinion. What do you think, Dr. Kelly?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:27:40):

Yes, definitely organic. I think that that is the best way to go. Yes. Okay. Next question. We talked a lot about food sensitivity testing, and I just had Dr. Just had Michelle put Dr. Ingels in the chat. He’s a naturopath who’s licensed here in California. He has some licenses in other states such as Connecticut that I do not. So that’s a possibility. If you’re not local and you’re in a state where I don’t have licensure or if you want to work with an naturopath, and so that’s their for you if

Sarah Choszczyk (01:28:24):

You want it. He’s a lovely person.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:28:26):

Oh yeah, he’s fantastic. We loved Dr. Ingles. I’m sure we’ll have him on the webinar series at some point. He’s one of my dearest friends, so I always like to support him and his work, his interest is mostly autism. He also has a Lyme book out and does a lot of this allergy and sensitivity. We co-hosted a allergy summit in 2023. Okay. Let’s see. How about, is milk thistle helpful to take before or after alcohol?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:29:03):

That’s a great question. There are certain herbs I know a little bit about, but I’m not an herbalist, so I don’t know what all of the benefits of milk thistle are. I know that it’s supported to the liver, but again, when alcohol is metabolized, you get acid all to hide in your gut as well. So I’m not

Kelly McCann, MD (01:29:23):

Sure there’s much for the acid.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:29:25):

I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Just general support for your liver. I don’t know if taking one dose though is really going to do it. I feel like with herbal with many herbs, it’s sort of one of those things that you take regularly if you might want to talk to an herbalist about that.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:29:41):

Yes. If you’re supporting your liver, I love body Bio PC for supporting liver. There’s research that it supports your entire gastrointestinal system. The mucus layer is mostly phospholipids and mostly phosphatidylcholine. So I’m a big fan of PC for all things, gastrointestinal brain health, et cetera. So that’s another option two. And the next part of that question was how is enzalase different from Enzyme Medica Digest gold enzymes? So the Enzymatics professional product is called critical digestion by Enzyme Sciences. So they have their consumer products and they have their professional products. We carry both. I’ve tried the Enzyme Enzymatic equivalent. It doesn’t work the same, don’t, it’s a little bit of magic. I know that the owners of the company don’t advertise that it helps metabolize alcohol. I don’t really know how it works. Maybe it has an ability to digest the acid alde height. I have no idea, but it’s not the same stuff.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:30:59):

There are a lot of different digestive enzymes. And so when you’re getting an enzyme product that is made for the professional level, like the enzalase and the critical digestion, the potency is usually really there. It’s usually third party tested through the roof. It sometimes we’ll have a lot more different types of enzymes. So you have many different types of enzymes that deal with carbohydrates. There are so many different types of sugars that you need to digest. So when you get something from the store, if you just need something here and there or that pizza gives you issues, but everything else is fine, you can try something like the Enzymatica from the store when you eat pizza and it will probably help. But if you have some sort of more chronic digestive things or you have pancreatic insufficiency and you really need a lot more robust support, getting something like the critical digestion or the enzolace is going to give you a little bit more of that consistent critical, that consistent support, in my opinion.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:03):

Thank you. That’s great. Hi, Jane. I’m glad you’re here. Hopefully you’re still here. So we’re going to answer your question. What is the recommendation for proper timing of eating healthy foods slash meals during the day, assuming that one is eating the proper ratio of healthy fats and carbohydrates?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:32:21):

That’s a really fantastic question.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:27):

We’ll come

Sarah Choszczyk (01:32:27):

Back. Oh, am I here?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:30):

Yes. Try again. We didn’t Go ahead. Okay.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:32:35):

So the first part of my answer is going to be to listen to your body, right? So listen for those hunger cues when you feel them. Sometimes I ask people, what does it feel like when you’re hungry? And they go, so that would be my first suggestion is to really think about what does hunger feel for you? But for the most part, a good thing to think about is eating protein at every meal. Yes. Eating breakfast, even if it’s small, making sure you have something in the morning.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:33:16):

Shoot. Come back, Sarah. In the morning. You froze. You froze. So we got the

Sarah Choszczyk (01:33:31):

Oh, yeah. You’re coming in and out too.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:33:32):

Yeah. So we just got that. You said, make sure you have something in the morning. Make sure there’s protein at every meal. What else?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:33:42):

Yes, especially to fuel your workouts, make sure you’re fueling your workouts and that you’re getting a little bit after workouts. So eating throughout the day. I wouldn’t say eating grazing throughout the day, but eating your meals kind of consistently throughout the day. Protein at each meal. Fiber at each meal, but mostly, yeah, intuition. Listening to your hunger cues, listening to your satiety cues and keeping things as consistently as possible.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:34:12):

Got it. Okay. Jamie asked or said, I was diagnosed with MCAS and I’m definitely histamine and intolerant. I’ve been trying to follow a low histamine diet since the diagnosis four years ago, but I continue to get worse. Intractable migraines, IBS, constipation, brain fog, joint pain. Any suggestions?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:34:35):

Yeah, I would think there’s probably some other underlying things that need to be addressed with someone who is burst in mast cell activation and all of its related conditions.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:34:46):

It really sounds like the root cause hasn’t been identified. So when people are continuing to get worse, that sends alarm bells in my head. It’s not just about the diet and trying to enforce a low histamine diet and they’re not doing it well enough. It’s not that at all. It’s that there’s something else that’s disrupting your immune system and causing leading to that hyperresponsive state. And so finding a practitioner that you can work with, I think would be my primary suggestion. Let’s see. Somebody asked about the name of the fatty acid test. Yes. So it was Kennedy Krieger test at Johns Hopkins paroxysmal lab. The peroxisome is a little organelle in the cell, just like the mitochondria is an organelle in the cell. And what that peroxisome does is it makes all of our fats, so it breaks down our fats. It makes our fats. It is super, super important because if we can’t make fats and break down fats, we can’t make our cell membranes, we can’t make our cholesterol, we can’t make our hormones. So super important. That’s what that one was.

(01:36:07):

Let’s see. My husband is doing slit therapy, and I just got his IgG results back, wondering if I can send the results. And can they adjust by adding eggs, dairy, and gluten? I don’t really know. It depends on who you’re working with and how they’re set up to work with you. I would think that if they’re doing slit therapy and ordered IgG results, that they would be willing to alter the sublingual immunotherapy. Okay. Carol R got back to us. Polyphenols are founded food. Dr. Kelly used the word phenol. Phenolics when referring to the almonds, peas, and rice. So reactions to foods are an individual issue?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:36:58):

Yes.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:36:59):

Yes. So polyphenols are not quite the same thing as the phenolics. The phenolics, though, are chemical compounds that can be found in families of foods, is how I think about it. So tomatoes and peppers, green red peppers have within them a phenolic called piperine. So when Dr. Ingles does the testing, he will test and we will treat with the piperine sublingual immunotherapy. You avoid the foods in the family, you treat with the phenolic rather than taking sublingual immunotherapy for every single food, you do it for the phenolics. That’s how they group them together because they’re related rather than having a food immunotherapy for tomatoes and immunotherapy for peppers. Does that make sense? And

Sarah Choszczyk (01:38:02):

Yes. Say polyphenols. We’re talking about plant compounds, mostly plant compounds, sometimes other compounds, but they can include the phenolic acids and other types, flavonoids, tannic acids, things like that. So when we’re talking about polyphenols, it’s like a big word for all of those different compounds.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:38:21):

Okay. Last question and then we’ll let everybody go. Annette said, my daughter and her boyfriend love eating white rice. I have them. It’s unhealthy for the teeth and very starchy. What’s your take on white rice? And what about soy milk?

Sarah Choszczyk (01:38:43):

Yeah, white rice. We have cultures across our globe that eat a lot of white rice too. And again, I really think it matters to look at the entire dietary pattern. So are they also eating fibrous vegetables? Are they eating lots of different colorful fruits and vegetables? Are they eating lots of high quality lean proteins? So again, making sure we’re able to see the forest for the trees. Is it a good idea to maybe incorporate some other whole grains? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. But that would be my thought on one particular food in an entire dietary pattern. And then soy milk was the other question. My thought on soy products in general is that the research that I’ve seen is that especially organic, non GMO soy products can be fine for most people. If it’s something that you’re uncomfortable with, there’s lots of different dairy free milk products out there. You won’t be completely missing one compound if you skip soy milk. But I personally drink soy milk myself, and I know it’s not accessible to some people. Some people are allergic to it. Some people have issues with hormone related conditions. They can’t eat a lot of phytoestrogens and things like that. But a lot of the research suggests that soy products for most people is fine. They’re fine,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:40:19):

Provided it’s non gmo. Non GMO as much as possible. I mean, if your only option is you don’t know, I would steer clear. But if you want to indulge in that, just making sure that your sources are clean. Sarah, this has been amazing. I know we didn’t get to talk about the GLP ones, but we could

Sarah Choszczyk (01:40:46):

Do an entire webinar on how to do GLP -1 for sure. But a lot of the GLP-1, increasing things that I’ve talked about already are things like getting your protein, getting your fiber. It’s very satiating. That actually increases GLP-1. So there you go. There it is right there. Webinar not needed. Right? There’s in the

Kelly McCann, MD (01:41:09):

32nd clip. So this has been amazing. I love all of your information. You’re so well studied and researched. Where can people find you if they want to work with

Sarah Choszczyk (01:41:22):

You? So the best thing they can do is actually find me through your website. So drkellymccann.com. If you hover over services, the very first thing in the dropdown menu is nutrition consultation. You can see me, even if you are not a patient with Dr. Kelly, there’s an option there for a 30 minute or a 60 minute consult. If it’s the first time you’ve seen me, please choose the 60 minute. We can talk about a lot, but I understand it’s not always financially accessible to everyone. So we can do a lot of good work in 30 minutes, and that’s the best place to get that in touch with me.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:42:01):

Fantastic. Yes. Hopefully people will see how amazing you are and seek out your services. So thank you so much for being with us, Sarah. I really, really appreciate you as always my right hand gal for so many years.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:42:19):

Well, thank you for having me, and thanks for such amazing questions from everyone. It was really great.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:42:24):

Yes, thank you. So we will put out the replay sometime next week. Michelle will work on that, and there will be a transcript and then you can listen to the whole webinar or if you missed parts of it. And then just so you know too, our next webinar is going to be with Julie Walraven, our nurse here at the spring center, and she’s going to be talking about IV nutrients unlocking the power of phosphatidylcholine. So we’ll be talking about PC some more and IV versions of that and nutrient therapy and even chelation. And that will be November? No, what is that? December 6th? December 6th at one 30. It starts a little bit later than our usual time of 11 and or one, so at one 30 on the six. And we look forward to seeing you then. Thank you again, Sarah. It’s been great.

Sarah Choszczyk (01:43:26):

Thank you. Thank you so

Kelly McCann, MD (01:43:27):

Much. Thanks everyone. Everyone, everyone. Bye.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Justine Stenger from Body Bio on our most recent webinar. Justine and I discussed the importance of mitochondrial health and addressing mitochondrial dysfunction. We explored how phospholipids, fatty acids, and other lifestyle choices can be used in lieu of pharmaceuticals to restore mitochondrial functioning, gain energy and live optimally. With over 12 years of experience supporting patients with chronic, complex illnesses as they restore their mitochondrial health, Justine always has a wealth of knowledge to share, and I’m so grateful to her for this enlightening conversation.

I’d also like to give a special thanks to Body Bio for sponsoring this webinar. We appreciate their partnership and support.

To learn more about Body Bio’s supplements, visit their website here.

Click here to learn more from Justine Stenger, and be sure to follow her on Instagram here, too!

Please note, Justine teaches a mitochondrial restoration class that begins in February and also offers a mini course on nutrition for cellular health for those who are looking to learn more about the nutritional aspects of cellular function. You can find both links here:

• Fueling your cells
• Mitochondrial Restoration Program

Recommended products from the conversation with Justine:

• Body Bio PC
• Omega Supreme
• Body Bio Balance Oil
• Evening Primrose Oil
• EMR-Tek Blue Light Blocking Glasses

As always, for those interested in working with Dr. McCann and her team, we welcome you to visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:02):

Welcome everyone. So happy to be here today on Friday, November 8th. We are hanging out with a very cool person today. Her name is Justine Stenger. Hi Justine. Hi Kelly.

(00:00:18):

Justine received her degree from the University of Alberta and then has gone on to receive certifications in holistic nutrition and she can work as a therapeutic chef. She’s bison trained, has completed her functional medicine training from IFM and is certified as a functional medicine health coach and also a GAPS coach. For the past 12 years, she’s worked clinically alongside Dr. Bruce Hoffman, who is a mast cell expert, brilliant physician, and she supports patients with complex chronic illnesses, restoring their mitochondrial health. She also works with Body Bio, who is our proud sponsor today. We’re very happy that Body Bio is helping support these webinar series, and I’m so excited to talk to you, Justine. It’s always a wealth of information.

Justine Stenger (00:01:16):

I’m so glad to be here. Kelly, I love talking with you and I love talking about mitochondrial medicine and phospholipids and fatty acids, so hopefully I can provide lots of value to everyone who’s joining today.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:01:29):

Great, thank you. Let’s see, so let’s dive in. Let’s talk a little bit about mitochondria fatty acids. Where should we start? Because for some people they might have heard the term mitochondria, they know it has something to do with energy. They know it’s somewhere in the cell, but it gets a little bit more confusing after that. And so I’d love to pick your brain and elaborate a little bit more about those precious mitochondria.

Justine Stenger (00:02:06):

Yeah, those sentient little beings. So I think that just to start to remind everyone if they can go back to high school biology and maybe even junior high, where we learned that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the south. And so for a very long time we really reduced the mitochondria down to just producing ATP being our little energy bunnies. So if you think about the mitochondria, look.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:02:42):

So Justine froze for a second while we’re waiting for her to come back online hopefully soon. Oh, there you are. Feel free to say hi in the chat. We will be taking questions. We’re going to chat for a while, Justine and I, she’s going to share some information and then we will take questions. So feel free to put your questions in the q and a. Michelle, my assistant is in the chat monitoring and answering questions there, or reminding you to put your questions in the q and a section. And so now that Justine is back on her internet break, you can, I’m sorry,

Justine Stenger (00:03:25):

I didn’t even notice that Anything, I was just jibber jabbing away, so hopefully I am hardwired so I’m not getting internet signals that anything is wrong. So hopefully we’re okay. I was saying that, I don’t know what you heard, but I’ll maybe start from the beginning that we have always been taught that the mitochondria are powerhouses of the cell. So we’ve really reduced the mitochondria down to producing ATP. And if we think about, if we go back to high school and think about what we learned, even just in high school biology, we learned that the mitochondria were these little jelly bean like organelles within our cell that make energy that’s driving all of our biochemical processes. And now we know that the mitochondria do way more than just make a TP and they make water, which is really creating this beautiful battery within the cell. So when we talk about cellular hydration, the mitochondria play a key role in cellular hydration. They’re regulating cellular metabolism, they’re involved in calcium storage and signaling. They’re involved in the production and regulation of reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species. They control apoptosis and autophagy, they regulate cellular. What is

Kelly McCann, MD (00:04:43):

Apoptosis and autophagy for the people who may not know those terms?

Justine Stenger (00:04:48):

Yeah, so basically where we’re talking about cleaning away autophagy, cleaning away unhealthy cells and apoptosis is cell death. So they’re controlling those processes and those are tightly regulated by circadian biology, which we’ll probably get into as well. They’re involved in thermogenesis, so our mitochondria actually make heat. They’re involved in vision infusion and mitophagy specifically. So speaking of autophagy, they’re involved in neo innate immune response. Mitophagy would be then mitochondrial autophagy,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:05:28):

Yes. Ah, okay. Mitochondrial autophagy. So getting rid of broken mitochondria.

Justine Stenger (00:05:35):

Yes, exactly. Very, very important because our mitochondria have an amazing ability to regenerate, which is exciting when we look at the field of longevity as well, they’re involved in hormone synthesis. So our mitochondria actually make pregnenolone our master hormone. And I think that that’s often missed even when we talk about functional medicine and supporting hormones. Well, supporting hormones really comes down to supporting the mitochondria as our very first step. They’re intimately connected Kelly to aging and longevity and ultimately our health span and our lifespan and actually lifespan, I should say, is a little bit less known whether or not we can improve mitochondrial function to actually improve our lifespan or if it’s just more connected to healthspan, the function of the mitochondria that I get most excited about. Actually, I’m excited about all these functions that are mitochondria I mentioned are these sentient beings. So they act as our sixth sense. So I often tell people, especially the people that I’m working with, that most of the diseases that we see today, most of the symptoms that manifest are a result of the environment being unsafe. The mitochondria are sensing that the environment is not safe to not only restore healing or continue that healing or the health cycle.

(00:06:59):

And this is actually proven also by Dr. Doug Wallace who has found that anywhere between 85 and 95% of the diseases that we see today as clinicians, Kelly, are actually of mitochondrial origin. So the United States spends, I think it’s roughly $3 trillion per year on studying nuclear DNA, genetic disorders, genetic diseases, and through Doug Wallace’s work, this is a prime example of silo medicine. We have all these different experts that are studying very, very specific things and there’s not a lot of communication happening. And so we continue to spend all this money on studying genetic disease and we know through Doug Wallace’s work that the majority of the diseases that we see today have nothing to do with genetics at all, have everything to do with mitochondrial dysfunction. And this is also where I’m really going to stress hopefully in our conversation about the importance of making sure that we are in an environment that is conducive to healing and actually mold illness and CIRS, which a lot of people are familiar with is kind of a prime example of this.

(00:08:08):

We all know that if we’re in an environment that is moldy, that that can induce a condition called chronic inflammatory response syndrome. But this goes for everything that we see. We always have to first assess the environment they’re involved in redox signaling. So most people are probably familiar with reduction in oxidation. So oxidation being the loss of an electron reduction being a gain of electron. And these reactions are taking place all the time simultaneously. And so they’re really, really intimately connected in affecting that whole cellular response to oxidative stress and environmental cues through that as well. And then we look at researchers like Nick Lane who is studying the role of carbon dioxide, and we always believe that carbon dioxide was a byproduct, but carbon dioxide is not a byproduct at all. He’s studied the bore effect and how the carbon dioxide is so important because as we have this increase in carbon dioxide that is going to allow oxygen to be delivered to the mitochondria. And so all of these things that we kind of had that current paradigm of mitochondrial health and what the mitochondria do in their roles, and now we have more of a quantum paradigm of the mitochondria and we can see how impacted they are by quantum things. So light rounding, non-native EMFs, all of these exposures that we have environmentally play an intimate role in the health of those amazing little organelles.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:09:51):

How do you think about or talk about the quantum part of this, what does that mean to you? Well, because we know from the Avengers what the quantum realm is, and maybe some people are familiar with Joe Dispenza’s work and the quantum realm. I’m curious how you use that term.

Justine Stenger (00:10:13):

Yeah, I mean I would think that we’re referring to how atomic particles and subatomic particles interact with us with our physiology. So the smallest particles of light, things that are discreet and visible units in the physical realm. And if people think about quantum mechanics, that’s a field that explains the behavior of particles at that very, very small scale. And so we can translate that to what’s happening in the human body. So I say all the time, Kelly, that we’re not, we’ve looked at the human body through the lens of biochemistry, and I’m sure that you can say that was your medical

Kelly McCann, MD (00:10:57):

Training. Absolutely.

Justine Stenger (00:10:58):

And now we understand that the human body is not a biochemical experiment at all. The human body is biophysical. And so if we don’t pair physics and biochemistry together, I believe personally, from what I understand, from what I’ve learned specifically in the last year, year and a half, that we’re never going to really be able to understand how to get somebody well and help people to stay well, we have to combine those two fields.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:29):

Absolutely. Okay, so now we know what mitochondria are, and I think you might have a couple of pictures to remind people what mitochondria look like.

Justine Stenger (00:11:40):

Yeah, let’s take a look at this because we have all of these roles that the mitochondria have, and I want to specifically highlight today the importance of the phospholipid bilayer, the mitochondrial membrane. So we have about 37 trillion cells in the human body, and we have

Kelly McCann, MD (00:12:04):

37 trillion.

Justine Stenger (00:12:06):

37 trillion, yes. And we have about 200 different cell types in the body. We have roughly 500 trillion mitochondria. And like I mentioned before, that depending on the organ is going to determine the number of mitochondria that are present. So we have tons of mitochondrial density in the brain. That’s our most mitochondrial dense organ. We also have immense mitochondria in the heart, liver, in an oocyte in an egg. We have a million mitochondria. And so this is really interesting to understand that and also understanding that we inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother. And so Doug Wallace actually does a really beautiful job of explaining how we can really help to optimize outcomes in child in the help of the children just by optimizing the help the mitochondria in the mother just because they’re literally giving all of their mitochondria to the baby. And so depending on the organ, it’s going to depend on the number of mitochondria that are in each cell.

(00:13:20):

Skeletal muscle also has tons of mitochondria. And so then we have all these other organelles as well. So it’s not just the mitochondria in the cell. We have the parone, the endoplasmic reticulum, lysosome ribosome. So we’ve got lots of organelles within the cell. And the interesting thing when we look at the structure and function of not only the cell membrane but also the membranes of the organelles within the cell are that if an organelle doesn’t have an membrane, it’s interacting with one. So we know we have these biological membranes on every single cell. We know that we have biological membranes on every single organelle. And if an organelle doesn’t have a membrane, again, it’s interacting with one. So the mitochondrial membrane, which I’m going to focus on today, this is the topic of conversation, is rich in phosphatidylcholine on the outer membrane. So I mentioned the mitochondria have an outer membrane and have an inner membrane here. So you can see this inner membrane here. If you watch my cursor, you see all these folds. These are called cristae. This inner membrane is rich in. So when we think about the body bio phospholipid complex, which Kelly I’m the biggest fan of is the one thing that you

Kelly McCann, MD (00:14:31):

And me, we might rival each other for the biggest free one.

Justine Stenger (00:14:35):

Everybody on the planet I believe should be taking that view formula of these conditionally essential nutrients so that we have the exact materials to build healthy membranes like we see right here. Absolutely. And so this inner membrane is so important. This is where oxidative phosphorylation occurs. So this is where, again, going back to the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, this is where we make ATP on this membrane. This is also where we make water. So if you are familiar at all with Gilbert Ling’s work and also Dr. Jerry Pollock has really built on Gilbert Ling’s work, and they are studying the energy that the water in the cell creates to drive these biochemical processes. So I think it was Gilbert Ling that originally found that the ion channels, they take up so much energy that all the energy that the mitochondria would be making if it was just relying on ATP would be going to support these ion channels.

(00:15:37):

And so Dr. Jerry Pollock has built on that now, and he’s actually found that when you put an electrode in the electron rich zone of the water in the cell and you put electrode in the proton rich water in the cell, it lights up an LED light. So we’re regenerating so much energy in each and every one of our cells. And so the formation, the creation of water, and the creation of ATP are happening on this inner mitochondrial membrane. Now on top of this membrane, this is really fascinating. This is another thing that the mitochondria do is this phosphatidyl ethanolamine membrane actually synthesizes another phospholipid that’s called the cardiolipin. And you can’t see the protein complexes in this picture, but I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with the protein complexes that sit within this inner mitochondrial membrane. So in order for us to make water and make ATP, we have these electrons that tunnel throughout complex one to two, to three to four complex four, we make water and complex five or ATPAs is where we make a TP.

(00:16:46):

So the cardiolipin sits on this inner mitochondrial membrane and it houses complex one, complex three, and complex four. The cardiolipin is also responsible for maintaining this incredible shape of this inner mitochondrial membrane. And the cardiolipin is intimately connected to the lifespan of the mitochondria because of the role that it plays in maintaining the structure of this inner membrane. So we have to have adequate amounts of the phospho ethanolamine that phospholipid in this inner mitochondrial membrane in order to synthesize adequate amounts of the cardiolipin, which has significant roles when it comes to mitochondrial health and longevity. And the cardiolipin, this is where we need phospholipids. And then the cardiolipin is rich in linoleic acid and linoleic acid. As you know, Kelly very well gets very demonized in this whole field, this essential omega six fatty acid. And so this is where I always recommend the body bio balance oil with the phospholipid complex because if we want a comprehensive program to support our mitochondria and to support our outer cell membrane, we want to make sure that we’re supplying the body with adequate amounts of linoleic acid because of the role specifically when we talk about mitochondria because of the role that it plays in the cardiolipin.

(00:18:11):

Now, the cardiolipin is a really unique, I’m going to show you actually, I don’t know if I have an image of a phosphatidylcholine molecule here, but a phosphatidylcholine molecule or a phospholipid molecule has a head group. So phosphatidylcholine has a polar head group. There’s a phosphate group. It sits on a glycerol backbone. So a glycerol molecule is a three carbon molecule, and then it has two fatty acid tails. And so those two fatty acid tails are typically going to be, one of them is going to be a saturated fat, and one of them is going to be a polyunsaturated fatty acid. Now the difference between a typical Yeah, yeah.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:18:53):

Can you make sure that your volume is up, Justine? Some people are having trouble hearing you.

Justine Stenger (00:18:59):

Oh, okay. Can you hear me now?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:01):

I can hear you just fine, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else that needs to be done, but

Justine Stenger (00:19:09):

Okay, I have my volume on full. I will try to

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:12):

Yell. No, don’t yell. Just maybe speak into the mic.

Justine Stenger (00:19:17):

Okay. Yeah, I’ll speak a little bit louder. So the cardiolipin, instead of having two phosphates fatty acid tails, the cardiolipin has four fatty acid tails. And all four of those fatty acid tails should be linoleic acid. And so this is where we could go down lots of rabbit holes here, Kelly, but this is where it becomes really detrimental to overdo the omega-3 fatty acids and neglect omega six

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:49):

Because

Justine Stenger (00:19:50):

Specifically DHA will displace linoleic acid from the cardiolipin. Now the cardiolipin undergoes remodeling all the time. So depending on the fatty acids that you’re consuming through your diet is going to determine the concentrations in the cardiolipin what those fatty acid tails are actually made up of. And so that’s where we really want to focus on balance and harmony between the omega six and the omega side of our essential fatty acids. And then support with adequate amounts of phospholipids so that we have the exact materials that we need to build healthy membranes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:20:29):

I think some people are confused because we’re not changing the slides, so maybe if we’re not using the slides, we can just put ourselves back to full screen. Thank you. Thanks. Sorry folks. Justine is a wealth of information. This feels a little bit like drinking from fire hose, and we do have transcripts, so don’t worry, and we’ll make sure that we get all the spelling right on all the words and the transcripts. But I think that the important points are really the different kinds of fatty. So, and I don’t know if you have a picture, but talk about omega threes, omega sixes, and kind of how they get metabolized. That would be really helpful for people so that they can see these. And just for the listeners too, these are essential fats and a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I do healthy fats. I take my olive oil and I take my avocado oil. And those are mostly omega nines. So Justine is going to tell us about omega threes and omega sixes, which are the essential ones that we really need that we cannot get, that we have to get from our food and our supplements. So take it away.

Justine Stenger (00:21:56):

Okay. And I will say, Kelly, that this whole recommendation to consume massive amounts of omega nine is actually, when you look at it through the lens of cell and brain medicine, it’s actually a dangerous recommendation because high amounts of omega nine are actually going to deplete your essential fatty acids. So we have very specific enzymes that are required to absorb these fatty acids. The Delta nine desaturated enzyme is involved in the absorption of oleic acid and actually the creation of oleic acid from steric acid. So like Kelly said, oleic acid is made in the body, so it’s not an essential fatty acid. You could never consume any olive oil, and as long as you were consuming adequate amounts of steric acid and you have an optimal nutrition profile, so you are supporting that delta 90 desaturated enzyme, you should efficiently be able to make all the oleic acid that you need through steric acid.

(00:22:56):

So if you’re consuming animal protein specifically ruin in animals, your body’s going to take that steric acid and it’s going to desaturated into oleic. Oleic acid is not an essential fatty acid. So when we talk about healthy fats, there’s a lot of misunderstandings out there. And of course we need saturated bats. And there’s nothing wrong with using some really good quality olive oil in a cold application as long as you’re not cooking with it. And I think it’s also really important to understand that it’s not essential. So your body only has a handful of essential nutrients. When we give our body those essential nutrients, it’s able to synthesize everything in our body. And of course there’s nuances to that. The environment that we’re in is going to play a huge role in how efficient your body is at taking those essential nutrients and converting them to everything that’s needed.

(00:23:52):

But when it comes to linoleic acid and alpha linoleic acid, these are two essential fat acids that your body is unable to make. So if we’re not getting functional forms of these two essential fatty acids from our diet or from supplementation using the body bio balance oil or the body bio evening from rose oil is another oil I’m a huge fan of, then we are missing out on essential nutrients that are required to keep our cells healthy, to keep our mitochondria healthy. And anybody that’s taken biochemistry, nutritional biochemistry, learns in their very first class that deficiencies in essential nutrients lead to disease and death. So that’s not up for negotiation. And yet we still are in this era where people are being told that linoleic acid an essential nutrient is bad for them.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:24:49):

So “seed oils are bad for you,”

Justine Stenger (00:24:54):

And some people are going so far to say to remove seeds as well. So this is a wild misunderstanding of cell membrane medicine and a wild misunderstanding of the rules that fatty acids play within the body. So I think that’s really important for everybody to understand. Now, there is a huge difference between industrial seed oils. Those are poison, those are not for human consumption. So we don’t want to blend the whole industrial seed oil conversation with essential fatty acid conversation. So we want functional forms of omega six. So I’m talking about pure unadulterated raw forms of omega six that’s found in the body bio balance oil, also found in things like raw seeds, so hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, all really great sources of essential fatty acids and are very rich in linoleic acid. Omega-3, the plant-based form of Omega-3. The alpha linolenic acid is not a major component of our cell membranes.

(00:26:03):

It’s predominantly a signaling molecule. And so just to also stress the importance of these two parent oils. So when people say parent oils, parent essential oils, essential fatty acids, these terms are all used interchangeably. Alpha linoleic acid and linoleic acid are signaling molecules to the endoplasmic reticulum to desaturate and elongate every single one of the fatty acids that’s made in the body. So when we have a deficiency in these two essential parent oils, we’re not only compromising the health of our outer cell membrane, the structure and the fluidity of the membrane, we’re also compromising our mitochondrial health, and we are also compromising our ability to synthesize every single fatty acid that’s needed in the body. So these are very, very important. If I didn’t make that very clear.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:27:00):

So basically we’re only as healthy as our cells are healthy and we have to eat the right kinds of nutrients in order to provide the building blocks to ourselves so that they can be as healthy. And since our cell membranes and our mitochondrial membranes are made up of very similar things, not exactly the same things, but very similar things, we need those building blocks for both. Right?

Justine Stenger (00:27:24):

Exactly. Exactly. And then we have a lot of things working against us in our environment today. I think that for a lot of people, Kelly, it’s really hard for them to fathom the environment that we’re living in. I know that I have done a lot of research and put a lot of effort into understanding the impact of non-native EMFs on our physiology. And the more and more that I understand the mechanisms of action and how these non-native frequencies directly damage ourselves, if we don’t have the materials to go in and restore that damage, we are going to end up with cell death. We’re going to end up with mitochondrial death. So one thing that we can ensure is make sure that we have adequate amounts of these essential fatty acids. We have adequate amounts of these phospholipids so that we have the materials that we need to go in and repair damaged aspects of our membranes, damaged aspects of our mitochondrial membrane. I was just reading a study prior to jumping on this call with you and I was looking at redox. I’m really interested in understanding redox potential because ultimately our redox potential is determining our health

(00:28:44):

And

Kelly McCann, MD (00:28:45):

Longevity.

Justine Stenger (00:28:46):

So the more electrical charge we have, the healthier that we’re going to be. And in the mitochondria, this is so significant because we have this really, really strong electrical charge in the membrane. The inner mitochondrial membrane is sitting at about 170 to 200 millivolts. The cell membrane is at about 70 millivolts for a healthy cell membrane. And so these non-native EMFs directly impact the voltage of our membrane. And again, the voltage of your membrane is intimately connected to your health and from running the IGL that everybody that comes in that’s sick, that has their membrane voltage tested it’s way down in the one 30 is one 40 is, and so they’ve lost that voltage. And so these are the consequences of living in an environment where we’re living in this soup of these non-native E EMFs that’s of they cause calcium to influx into the cell trigger the MDMA receptor to trigger glutamate, to trigger inflammation.

(00:29:51):

There’s lots of mechanisms of action. They deplete the exclusion zone water. So we want to make sure that we’re not only protecting ourselves from these very toxic frequencies to the best of our ability, and we also want to make sure that your body has everything that it needs to repair the damage. Because just like your bank account, if you’re only taking withdrawals out of your bank account and you’re never putting deposits back in, you’re going to end up bankrupt. But for some reason, we don’t think about the human body through that lens. We just think that we can go eat a whole foods based diet and live a healthy life and we’re going to be fine. But I don’t believe that’s our reality anymore. I really believe that we need to be pouring in all of these materials that are required to restore damage in order for us to keep our health, which is my goal for everyone.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:30:43):

Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree. There’s too many toxins, too many environmental problems, too much soil depletion, our nutrients, everything. But in particular when we’re talking about fatty acids and cellular and mitochondrial health, it’s all about those truly healthy bioactive fats. Could you speak to the delta desaturation and how when people take too much fish oil, why that’s problematic? Because I think that most many functional medicine and practitioners, well-meaning practitioners, conventional docs, they’re looking at an Omega index and they’re saying, oh, you need to get higher doses of omega threes, and we’re not always paying attention to the balance of the omega sixes and why that’s so important.

Justine Stenger (00:31:51):

Yeah. Kelly, you’re asking me my favorite questions. I think any questions though that involve cell membrane medicine are probably my favorite. So you see this fatty acid pathway. This is a basic essential fatty acid pathway. So you can see here, I’m just going to explain quickly the omega six side. So we have linoleic acid being our essential parent oil. This is the most prominent fatty acid that’s found within all of your cell membranes. So maybe I’ll just quickly say we have four main fatty acids that are found within our cell membranes. Linoleic acid is the most abundant. We have DHA, which is most abundant in the brain and in the eye, which is part of the brain. Then we have oleic acid that omega nine fatty acid, and we have AR arachidonic acid. And so this arachidonic acid is also on the omega six side.

(00:32:48):

And I’m sure most people have heard people say that AR arachidonic acid is inflammatory. It is one of the four most important fatty acids in our cell membranes. And I’ll explain maybe after why it’s referred to as inflammatory or most people see it through that very myopic lens. So this delta D 60 saturates enzyme is going to take this parent oil omega six and convert it to gamma linolenic acid. This is a fatty acid that’s rich in the body. Bio evening primrose oil. About 10% of primrose oil is going to be gamma linoleic. And then the delta D six is also going to take this gamma linolenic acid to homo gamma linolenic acid. So I want to stress the importance of this homo gamma linoleic acid because this is going directly into PGE one prostaglandins. This is incredibly anti-inflammatory. This is responsible for balancing the immune system.

(00:33:50):

This is low in or low levels are correlated with disease processes such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, eczema, psoriasis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We do not want this fatty acid to be low on the omega side. All of us are familiar with EPA and DHA and EPA and DHA through fish oil is handed out to like candy to everyone. Now, I do want to stress that EPA and DHA are essential fatty acids. They’re very important, so I don’t want to minimize how important they are. And I also want to stress that when we overconsume these fatty acids, specifically, EPA is going to directly compete with ar, arachidonic acid, DHA. So EP and DHA are both going to out compete for this delta D 60 saturates enzymatic activity. So the higher you dose the fish oil, the more you are going to inhibit your body’s ability to convert to these downstream metabolites. So what happens if you think about it through a very simple lens, higher levels of fish oil equal lower levels of omega six. The more you dose the fish oil, the more you’re going to deplete your omega six side.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:35:18):

What you just said, since the linoleic acid is the building block that helps you make the cardiolipin, you’re really going to mess up your mitochondria. In very simplistic terms,

Justine Stenger (00:35:33):

And this isn’t technically a scientific term, but what you’re really doing is you’re facilitating leaky cell membranes because linoleic acid is so important for providing that stability to the membrane. So we want that four to one ratio between the omega six to the omega side, and when we don’t have adequate amounts of omega six, the body is just going to do what it’s always doing. Its very best to protect us. And so it’s going to pull in the fatty acids that are available. And so if we have all these omega threes in the membrane, not only are they incredibly susceptible to oxidation, DHA has six double carbon bonds. It is your most susceptible to oxidation fatty acid, and it is also going to displace linoleic acid from the cardiolipin. And it’s also very immunosuppressive when we take high doses of fish oil long-term. I was just speaking with a couple of doctors this morning and we were talking about utilizing high dose fish oil, say the body bio fish oil is the one that I recommend when somebody has an onset of a migraine headache. We can use high dose fish oil more like a drug in certain situations and it can work really well. The problems arise when we take high amounts of omega threes long-term, and that’s really, really going to cause problems on a membrane level, on a cellular level.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:03):

That’s very helpful, thank you. I think with the commercially available testing, we’re looking at the omega index and that’s not really sufficient. So what are the tests that you recommend to look at fatty acid pathways?

Justine Stenger (00:37:23):

Yeah, that’s very kind of you. It’s not really sufficient. It’s not sufficient at all. It’s not even relevant. And it’s leaning towards, I don’t know if you know, I’ve actually been trying to get in touch with NeuroQuant, the lab to find out what ratio they’re using. I have been told that they’re using a one-to-one ratio, so they’re not even using a ratio. I mean, it’s very prevalent in the literature that the ratio that we want is four to one. And so yeah, you don’t want to use an index test. Before I get into the fatty acid testing, I just wanted to emphasize this. I think this is important for people to know about myelin because we’re always told that DHA is so important for the brain. And again, I want to stress DHA is very, very important for our brain, and so is a arachidonic acid.

(00:38:16):

So we have gray matter, which is rich in DHA, and we have white matter, which is rich in ar arachidonic acid and linoleic acid. And so remember what I just mentioned that the higher we dose the omega threes, the more we’re going to suppress the omega sixes. So while we’re targeting the brain through high dose DHA supplementation, we are negatively impacting the white matter. The brain doesn’t work just gray matter, just white matter. This comes as a unit. It works together. In order to optimize brain functioning, we have to optimize both gray and white matter. So even that narrative doesn’t make a lot of sense.

(00:39:01):

And then just to remember, arachidonic acid is very important. It is inflammatory. It can be inflammatory, and it’s been shown to be inflammatory because when there’s inflammation, when your body is making cell membrane, so this is of course not diagnostic, but it’s correlated with cancer because a arachidonic acid is going to be released from the cell membrane and the cells are going to pull that in to make new cells. And so yes, when there’s inflammation in the body, you’re going to see an elevation in AR arachidonic acid because it’s getting pulled from the cell membrane or it’s getting pulled from cell membrane to make inflammatory compounds. So linoleic acid plays almost no role in the increase in arachidonic acid. And the actual conversion of LA to AA is 0.2 to 0.5%. So it’s not efficient at all.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:03):

So the whole evil seed oil concept isn’t really playing into the inflammation directly is what you’re saying?

Justine Stenger ():

Not from functional forms. So seed oils, if we’re talking about the body bio balance oil or the evening primrose oil, if we are consuming industrial seed oils, it absolutely will because those oils are full of all kinds of compounds that are going to damage the membrane damage, the mitochondrial membrane aldehyde specifically damage our DNA. So those are inflammatory for sure. But yeah, not all seed oils. And I don’t really like to use the term seed oil because I feel like it’s been charged.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:47):

Yes, it’s been co-opted. So before you move on to whatever you were going to talk about, can you talk a little bit about that four to one ratio and the balance oil just so people have a broader context for that? Yeah,

Justine Stenger (00:41:05):

Yeah, perfect. So the balance oil is a four to one ratio of linoleic acid to alpha linoleic. And again, this has been studied for I don’t know how many years he’s been in research, probably 50 years. Dr. Yuda is the main fatty acid researcher that has studied this four to one ratio. So that’s why Body Bio made their essential parent oil blend in that ratio. Now remember that the balance oil doesn’t replace. We need that balance oil to support these essential fatty acids, but the balance oil doesn’t replace downstream metabolites. And that’s a question that I get all the time from people. So if I take the balance oil, I don’t need to take fish oil. I will say that my first recommendation is always to eat seafood. And the balance oil absolutely does not replace your need for DHA. You want to make sure that you’re eating seafood regularly. And the balance oil also doesn’t replace your need for the gamma linoleic and the di homo gam linolenic and the arachidonic acid. So if you want comprehensive support for the omega six side, I always recommend the evening primrose oil. I’m a huge, huge supporter of that oil because that’s helping with this direct conversion to homo, which I mentioned before, is going into these PGE one prostaglandins. And then I also recommend raw egg yolks daily to support ar arachidonic acid and egg yolks are a beautiful source of linoleic acid as well. And

Kelly McCann, MD (00:42:39):

You don’t worry about salmonella in your raw eggs, you just eat them. They’re okay.

Justine Stenger (00:42:44):

No, I mean, I always recommend pastured eggs, so I would never be getting a conventional egg and eating it raw. So yeah, get pastured pastured eggs from a farmer you trust. And those yolks are best raw for sure.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:43:00):

So not pasteurized, pastured, pastured, living on a pasture free range, free range chickens. Okay. And then do you just drink it? How do you take that?

Justine Stenger (00:43:16):

So I usually put egg yolks Kelly in when I make a super stew. I’ll just put the soup in my bowl and then I add a couple of egg yolks to the broth. That’s how I eat the most of the time. In the summer, I always make Russian custard. So it’s basically just frozen egg, you whip egg yolks until they’re really frothy. And I add a little bit of raw honey. I sometimes add some full fat whipping cream, and then I just pour that batter into parchment paper cups and pop them into the freezer. They’re like little ice creams and they’re delicious and a really great way to get in all those amazing nutrients. And in the wintertime, I just add the raw egg yolk to a broth, and that’s probably the easiest way. I know you were asking about the fatty acid testing, so

Kelly McCann, MD (00:44:10):

Oh, well, we can continue. We’ll go back there in a second. So how do you suggest people use the balance oil and how much?

Justine Stenger (00:44:21):

Yeah. Okay. So the balance, it’s a good question and it’s hard for me because I’m so used to seeing red blood cell fatty acid tests and doing macro and micronutrient evaluations on people. I would say that a tablespoon of the balance oil is probably going to be a good insurance policy for most people. And just keep in mind that if somebody is still feeling the fear mongering of a speed oil, just know that you can use the evening primrose oil. Evening primrose oil is also very rich in linoleic acid. Only about 10% of evening primrose oil is comprised of GMA linoleic acid. You then just need to make sure that you’re also supporting this Omega-3, the plant-based form of Omega-3. So whether or not you want to add in some freshly ground black seeds or a couple tablespoons of chia seeds per week, you don’t need a lot of this alpha linolenic, but you do need to support it. So that’s another option for people too. And I would recommend a tablespoon of the evening primrose oil as well,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:45:30):

The whole tablespoon. Okay.

Justine Stenger (00:45:33):

Yeah.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:45:34):

What milligram dose is that? Usually

Justine Stenger (00:45:36):

15. 15 mils. And I usually do that in divided doses, and that depends too, Kelly on. Keep in mind, most people that I work with are really depleted in the omega sixes, and so I’m using that to help to build their omega six profile. And if you are doing a tablespoon of the balance oil and adding in the evening primrose to support these downstream metabolites, I usually will recommend a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half. So four to six capsules of the EPO daily. Now keep in mind, this is a general recommendation. So there are people that I work with that are taking three tablespoons of the balance oil, specifically people that are coming from a doctor that has a shoemaker doctor, that’s a perfect example. These people that have been on really, really high dose fish oil for sirs, they are always completely depleted.

(00:46:37):

Their omega sixes are in desperate need of support. So sometimes we’ll use really high doses of the balanced oil and the evening from rose oil until we test again and then pull them back down to more of a maintenance dose. And with the balanced oil, you can use it just like you would any oil that you use only in a cold application. So I make pesto with the balanced oil. I make salad dressing with the balanced oil. I will add it to my steamed vegetables after they’ve been plated. I typically will use it on food. That’s the way that I use it most often and recommend using it. We always want to take oils with animal protein never in isolation.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:21):

And it works great as a condiment in place of butter. It doesn’t have a lot of flavor, so that’s a good way to get it in. And yeah, I was just looking for really general recommendations, kind of healthy people who don’t have the testing. So anything else that we need to talk about with the fatty acid pathway before we talk about the testing?

Justine Stenger (00:47:51):

I am trying to think of some questions that I often get with the balance oil specifically, make sure that it’s kept in the fridge, make sure that the lid is kept on tight. Make sure that you use it within no more than 60 days of opening it, which you will easily, if you’re taking a tablespoon a day, you’ll go through that in a month. And I really do want to stress the importance of taking it with animal protein because when you consume polyunsaturated fatty acids with animal protein, it’s going to form a bond as it moves through the GI tract, and it’s going to protect those polyunsaturated fatty acids from oxidation. So you never want to just pop. I know a lot of people do this with fish oil as well. They just take fish oil. You never, ever, ever want to do that. You always want to take oils with bioavailable animal protein at a meal.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:48:51):

So after a meal with a meal sounds good. Yeah. And then obviously PC doesn’t fit in this pathway. Do you want to give some general recommendations about phosphatidylcholine or the phospholipid complex before we move on to the fatty acid testing?

Justine Stenger (00:49:10):

Yeah, so with the phospholipid complex, it’s the same idea. It’s really hard to say for sure because it’s going to be dependent on state of health and disease, your height, your weight, your metabolic demand, pregnant woman, I would recommend a much different dose than somebody for a maintenance dose. So you want to take a lot of factors into consideration. And I would say a tablespoon is probably what I would suggest as a general recommendation. That’s what I take and recommend as a maintenance dose. When I was going through some significant health challenges earlier in my life, I took three tablespoons of the PC for about a year.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:56):

That’s a lot. And how many capsules per tablespoon?

Justine Stenger (00:50:01):

Yeah, so the capsules, there’s 12 capsules in one tablespoon. So you’re looking at about 36 capsules if you’re up at the three tablespoon mark. I don’t not cost effective. I don’t recommend the capsules for high dosing. And again, I really think Kelly, one of the big mistakes that a lot of practitioners make with the PC or that practitioners that don’t really get bought into lipid replacement therapy, they’re just underdosing. So if you’re using two capsules or four capsules, I mean, like I said earlier, we have 37 trillion cells, 500 trillion mitochondria. You want to make sure that you’re giving lots of these lipids to support repairing all those membranes. Otherwise, I don’t think you’re going to move a needle a lot with a really low dose like that.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:48):

Yeah, I think that that’s a hard thing for a lot of patients to wrap their head around. They’re like, I’ll tell them, take one capsule, work up to six capsules, and then switch over to the liquid and work up to a tablespoon. And they come back and they’re like, yeah, I take two capsules. Okay, I didn’t do my job. We’re not going to get there.

Justine Stenger (00:51:11):

The best is when you see someone, I actually just saw someone yesterday that I had this exact conversation with. This patient was demyelinating on their first red blood cell fatty acid tests, significant neuroinflammation, very, very depleted in essential fatty acids. And I recommended three tablespoons until we test again. And he comes back and says, well, it’s so expensive. I’ve just been taking two. Well, first of all, he was complaining that his results haven’t improved, and I don’t usually see that. No improvement in a red blood cell fatty acid test after someone’s been on lipids for three or four months, and then he admits that he’s been taking two capsules because he’s trying to save money. I’m like, do you want to save money or do you want to save your brain? Pick and choose here.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:04):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So tell us about the fatty acid testing.

Justine Stenger (00:52:10):

Okay, so the fatty acid test, that’s the gold standard is done through the Kennedy Krieger Lab at the John Hopkins University. And that is based on a four to one ratio. It’s actually done through the Paroxysmal Center for Disease. And so it gives you so much information on plasmalogen levels, paroxysmal function, it’s going to indicate build up of very long chain fatty acids, renegade fatty acids. So if anyone is not familiar, those are highly inflammatory. When they get built up in the membrane, they’re a signal to the immune system. So we don’t want to build up of those. And it also gives us an idea of how efficient our prox zones are working, and also gives you insight into mitochondrial function because the mitochondria and our peroxisomes work intimately close together to beta oxidize fatty acids. And

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:06):

What does that mean?

Justine Stenger (00:53:09):

So basically turning fatty acids into a TP is

(00:53:15):

The gist, but often when people have mitochondrial dysfunction, what happens is the mitochondria fatty acids are more difficult to convert to than glucose. And so when they’re stressed and they’re dysfunctional, they’re going to send a lot of those fatty acids to the peroxisome, and the peroxisome then is going to beta oxidize those fatty acids, break them down into an eight carbon chain fatty acid or MCT oil. So we make MCT oil through that relationship with the mitochondria and the perone, and then MCT oil is much easier for the mitochondria to convert to energy. So when you see a buildup of these very long chain fatty acids in the peroxisome, you know that the peroxisome not taking those fatty acids and breaking them down into that MCT oil or eight carbon chain fatty acid. And so you can assume that there’s stress both on a mitochondrial level and a peroxisomal level, and that makes sense because all these organelles are working together. You can’t isolate the mitochondria and assume that if the mitochondria is deficient or not working functionally, then all the organelles are that it just doesn’t work that way. But it does give you a lot of insight into the specifics of the functioning of those organelles as well.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:37):

It’s my

Justine Stenger (00:54:38):

Favorite test.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:39):

I know. Could you take us off this view?

Justine Stenger (00:54:44):

Yeah.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:46):

So how do patients have access to that test? Is that still done through Body Bio then?

Justine Stenger (00:54:54):

It is not available through Body Bio right now. Unfortunately, for new practitioners, it is available through the Kennedy Krieger lab, and they do offer direct to consumer. So the only issue with that test, Kelly, as you know, I think I’m the only one that can look at that test and that I know of. I’m sure there’s many other people too that can put everything in the categories that are on the Body Bio report,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:55:24):

But most people definitely not do that,

Justine Stenger (00:55:26):

Would look at that test. Yeah. You think it’s Chinese to them for sure.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:55:31):

Is Body Bio hoping to bring that test back under their roof and offer that again or do you know?

Justine Stenger (00:55:38):

I am not privy to that information. I think it’s a question mark right now.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:55:45):

Okay.

Justine Stenger (00:55:45):

Any practitioners that have been ordering the test through Body Bio still have access to that test?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:55:52):

I just,

Justine Stenger (00:55:52):

Yeah. So you still have access to it? It’s just new practitioners. I think that they’re at capacity right now.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:56:00):

Okay. Well, thank goodness. I need to start ordering some more. Again, thank you for that encouragement.

Justine Stenger (00:56:07):

Maybe we can go over it. My favorite thing to do,

Kelly McCann, MD ():

I see that we have so many questions. I have a feeling that we aren’t going to get to all of them. So is there anything else that you want to chat about before we take a look at the and see if we can answer some of them?

Justine Stenger (00:56:28):

I think I would just say for everybody that’s on this call that feels lost in this whole world of functional medicine and all of the different supplements and things that are recommended for every single symptom that I really truly believe and have seen clinically for the last 13 years, that when you give your body what it needs to heal, it has an amazing ability to heal. I so start on a cellular level.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:03):

Yes, I love it. Okay. Let’s see. The first question is, I read where methylene blue along with RLT, not sure what that is, is good for new mitochondria and strengthening mitochondria. I don’t know if he got cut off. I’m not sure. What about methylene blue? How about that?

Justine Stenger (00:57:31):

Yeah, so there’s a ton of research showing that methylene blue can be really supportive to the mitochondria. It actually helps to improve the transfer of electrons from complex three to complex four. I will also say that I don’t think that methylene blue is for everyone. And so you want to work with somebody that understands methylene blue and I would say understands methylene blue from more of that quantum perspective. I think a lot of these things that we use probably impact timing mechanisms in the cell, and I think we just need to be careful about that because timing is everything. And I have also worked with people that use methylene blue that have experienced phenomenal improvements in energy. So

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:26):

Good to know. Yes. Alexis G, there will be a replay and we will send it out sometime next week along with the transcript. So you don’t even have to watch the whole video if you don’t want to. You can read the transcripts. Why are genetics being studied so vigorously and at great expense if it’s already known that root causes don’t originate in the genes hardly at all. That is a very good question.

Justine Stenger (00:58:55):

Yeah. Why do you think? Because it’s sexy, we can create drug therapies for gene diseases. We can’t create drug therapies for restoring mitochondrial functioning because restoration of the mitochondria requires all of the things that you do every single day to support your mitochondrial help. Yes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:59:21):

Since the keto diet emphasizes high fats, what are your thoughts on following such a diet?

Justine Stenger (00:59:27):

I don’t ever recommend or subscribe to one dietary dogma. I recommend local and seasonal foods. And when you understand mitochondrial the mitochondria a little bit more and mitochondrial longevity, our mitochondria need to shift through different states of metabolism in order for them to be healthy. And so we have what’s referred to as a winter metabolism, and we have what’s referred to as a summer metabolism. So summer metabolism, if you think about MTOR, that would be summer metabolism. So growth, proliferation, fat storage, lots of carbohydrates, lots of food availability. That would be the way we want to be eating when we’re in the summer and we’re exposed to a high solar yield and we have lots of things growing in our environment. And then of course, this is dependent on where you live, but if you live in a location like me where the ground is frozen for about seven months of the year, nothing is growing here.

(01:00:33):

And it’s really important then to sink into what’s called winter metabolism or AMPK metabolism, which is going to be more about autophagy, clearing up senescent cells, lowering phospholipid and fatty acid synthesis. It’s kind of a conservation metabolic state. It’s also a state of metabolism where you would use a lot more of the energy on your body as fuel, and we want to be cycling through those different metabolism. So to that question, a ketogenic diet would be akin to winter metabolism. So I’m all about a ketogenic diet in the winter, and I’m all about making sure that you don’t stay in a state of ketosis all year. When you’re in an environment that vegetables and fruits are growing, you want to make sure that you lean into those local and seasonal foods. So we want those metabolic shifts.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:01:29):

That makes a lot of sense. How can children and families of children in daycare over prolonged periods of time manage to keep their mitochondria healthy? Please provide your top tips on this. That sounds like a big question we should ask. Chat GPT. What?

Justine Stenger (01:01:55):

I was going to say, don’t send your kids to daycare. That’s probably the best way. I mean, it’s just hard now because they’re in these environments that are so rich in EMFs and they’re not given a lot of outdoor time and they’re under fluorescent lights. So I would say make sure that you are implementing as many things as you at home, making sure that you are adhering to really strict light and dark cycles that you ask the teacher if you can bring in a red light panel to have in the indoor environment. So you’re adding back some of those wavelengths of light that are so essential for our mitochondria, specifically infrared lights. And that’s probably the best you can do. Or ask them to keep the windows open in that daycare and the toxic fluorescent or LED lights off,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:02:53):

Probably reduce the wifi, make sure that they don’t have wifi or a 5G tower on the top of the school, things like that. I’m sure there’s a bunch of things that could be helpful. So Ellen wants to know more about your red lights, and I knew that somebody was going to ask. I have to tell us about your red lights.

Justine Stenger (01:03:15):

So whenever I’m working inside, so most of the time I work outside, but I mentioned that I unfortunately live in an environment that it started snowing in the beginning of October. So it’s not the best environment outside to be working all day. So when I’m inside, I just make sure that I keep a window open and I add back infrared light into my indoor environment. And this is really, we didn’t even get into this with mitochondrial functioning, but I talked about a lot about electron tunneling, the transfer of those electrons through protein complexes. We have chromophores on those protein complexes that absorb wavelengths of light and infrared light, cytochrome C oxidase. So that’s taking our electrons from complex three to complex four. It requires infrared light to function. And Kelly, you can probably see this on IGLs all the time, that cytochrome c oxidase is almost always poor.

(01:04:13):

It’s always low and it makes sense because we live in an environment where there’s no longer any infrared. So in making our indoor environment energy efficient, we are making very energy inefficient human beings because the sun is about 50% infrared light. So if we look at that from an ancestral lens, we would’ve always been exposed to infrared light, whether it’s summer or winter or fall or spring, we’re always getting that infrared light from the sun, and that is absolutely essential for healthy mitochondria. So we have these in every room in the house. We just add that infrared back inside to help.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:59):

Can you show us what it looks like? Yeah,

Justine Stenger (01:05:02):

It’s just a panel like this.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:05:05):

Okay. Alright. Where did you purchase that?

Justine Stenger (01:05:11):

So I buy these from a little Amish farm that makes them handmade. They’re very similar to Sauna space. Sauna space is a little overpriced. So if you can find a nice Amish farm, we have to get them from, you’re supporting a small little community and also getting really beautiful lights.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:05:32):

Very cool. And it’s pointed away from you or is it pointed to

Justine Stenger (01:05:37):

You? Yeah, I often will have it pointed towards, it’s very hot infrared is they use these in saunas, so you can actually create a little sauna tent with these and sauna space does that. You just put them inside the sauna tent. So it gets a little warm, but as long as it’s in the environment, I’m still adding that infrared to the environment, so I don’t necessarily need it directly on my body all day long.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:06:04):

How would that differ from there? Are a lot of companies out making these red light therapy now, red light therapy and infrared light therapy, are they the same? Are they different?

Justine Stenger (01:06:19):

So photobiomodulation referring to the red light panels,

(01:06:23):

Red light panels do have red and infrared lights built into them. And we have many of those. I think we have four or five of them in the house. So we also will often use those in a room, we’ll put them on the floor and just turn the timer all the way to zero so the lights stay on so that you’re getting red and infrared light. So we’ll often use those panels just to light up the kitchen if it’s before sunset or even after sunset. Sunset at times. So the panels are giving both red and infrared. And red is also very important for our mitochondrial functioning. And again, these are wavelengths of light that have been removed from our indoor space, which is honestly Kelly, I think it’s probably the main driver of disease today. Done such a deep dive on melanopsin and melanopsin damage and neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease, and even just how these lights impact our circadian biology.

():

And that is directly linked to your mitochondrial functioning. Everything. Every one of the 100,000 biochemical reactions or even more that take place in our cell are happening at a very specific time. And so if your body doesn’t know what time it is, it doesn’t know what to do or when to do it. So I was talking even about the methylene blue timing mechanisms are everything. And so it’s absolutely imperative that we make sure that the body knows what time it is because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to heal. So if we’re sitting under fluorescent lights or LED lights, which are in every home, now you are giving your brain the same signal all day long that it’s about noon. So the timing mechanism is never changing. So

Kelly McCann, MD (01:08:15):

How do you adjust and utilize the infrared lights? Do you just have them on the daytime and then you turn them off at dusk or nighttime?

Justine Stenger (01:08:24):

So we have a spectrometer that’s showing the different wavelengths of light. So these lights have no blue and no green. The brightness, it’s still quite bright. So in the evening we’ll cover it a little bit or turn it towards the wall so it’s not super bright. But we do use these after sunset as a light source. And then we also use just really dim red bulbs in the house after

Kelly McCann, MD (01:08:52):

The amber bulbs.

Justine Stenger (01:08:54):

Not amber, just red. 100%. Just red. Just red, yeah. Because the amber are going to impact, we want to have, so in order for melatonin to be released, and remember, your mitochondria make melatonin way higher concentrations than are secreted from the pineal gland. But when we talk about melatonin, that’s secreted from the pineal gland. And actually blue light from LEDs inhibits the mitochondria from making melatonin,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:09:22):

Right? Yes. Knew that.

Justine Stenger (01:09:24):

And so we have to be exposed to complete and total darkness for four hours for our pineal gland to release melatonin. And so if you’re exposed to any light, you look at your cell phone when you’re on the computer, you turn on a light in your kitchen, you turn on the light in your bathroom again, you’ve just swung your circadian clock back to noon, you’ve just completely disrupted that whole biological clock. So as soon as the sun goes down, you want to keep things as dark as possible and wear the red lens glasses that we talked about as well to make sure that you’re not getting any blue or green and into your eyes.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:10:09):

Wow. I’m going to move on. We could talk about this for much longer. Scott asked, what leads people to have anticardiolipin antibodies? What triggers that autoimmunity and how is it addressed?

Justine Stenger (01:10:24):

Well, it’s just like any other autoimmune disease. So it would be addressed in the exact same way that you would address any other autoimmune disease. And you also, speaking of, this is a good question, Scott, because I get this question a lot from people asking if they should supplement with the phospholipid complex in individuals who have an autoimmune condition that’s attacking their cardiolipin, it is lifesaving to take the phospholipid complex. And in terms of addressing it, I mean, I can go into everything that I would suggest to support autoimmunity, but speaking of sunlight, what regulates our immune system is the UV light going into our central retinal pathway into the hypothalamus activating POMC. POMC is cleaning into nine different peptides, which is involved in basically every aspect of your health, but also regulation of the immune system.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:11:25):

Okay. Just that. Okay.

Justine Stenger (01:11:28):

It’s a longwinded answer. Scott,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:11:31):

I have to, you’ll have to host her, have her be on your podcast again. Okay. Angela asked, what brand of blue blockers would you recommend for the least cost?

Justine Stenger (01:11:45):

So you don’t, Angela want to just find ones that are cheap because, and I can speak to this because we actually purchased a spectrometer to test a lot of these products because I feel I have a lot of integrity around what I recommend to the people that I work with. So I do not want to be recommending anything that a company has just told me works. So I really do my very best to test everything. And most of the companies that I’ve tested do not block out all of the blue and the green. And so you don’t want to just go on Amazon and buy a cheap pair of blue light blocking glasses. Unfortunately. I wish I could say you could. So you can contact me. Do you want me to use brands?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:29):

Yes. Yeah, that’s fine. You can use brands. That’s okay.

Justine Stenger (01:12:32):

I use a lot of EMR Tek. I really love EMR Tek. I really love their photobiomodulation panels as well. Actually, I can get into a lot of the details around that company if anyone’s interested. And you can always find me on Instagram too, if you have questions. I’m happy to answer any questions on social media if you have them. But they have some really, really fun styles. I have a whole bunch over here. I have, I don’t know how many pairs of these, I have probably have another 10 pairs in my room, but they have some really fun different frames. And so when you’re wearing them all the time, here’s another. So when you’re wearing them all the time, it’s kind of nice to have a few different options because especially when I’m wearing them out to conferences or speaking engagements or wherever. And so EMR Tek has not only glasses that block out all of the blue and the green. They also have some pretty fun styles.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:13:35):

And do you wear different glasses during the day versus nighttime?

Justine Stenger (01:13:39):

Yeah, so yes. Good question. So these ones are just a little yellow tint. So I wear these if I’m working inside on the computer, and then at nighttime I put on, as soon as the sun goes down, I put on these ones, and these are a red lens. So these are blocking out every wavelength of light that would impact my circadian health.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:14:02):

So those are your vampire glasses.

Justine Stenger (01:14:04):

Yeah. The funny thing is I’ve adapted to them so well, I mean, initially when I first started wearing them, I was like, I can’t see anything. And now I wear those. If I’m working at night, I have my screen completely red, I’m wearing my blue light blocking glasses with the red lens, and I’m like, my eyes have adapted perfectly to this.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:14:23):

Good to know. Yeah, I’ve definitely struggled with over my glasses. Glasses blockers. Okay. Steven said, you mentioned the demon linoleic acid. Can you comment on ox lambs and how peroxidation of LA can mess up the cardiolipins? I ox lambs. I don’t know what that is. I’m not sure what he’s referring to.

Justine Stenger (01:14:52):

Okay. Yeah, so I can speak to the oxidation of those polyunsaturated fatty acids in the cardiolipin because that’s impacting, like I mentioned, that’s intimately connected to the health of the mitochondria. And your body actually has a mechanism in which it protects the oxidation of those fatty acids in the cardiolipin. So we are able to remodel the cardiolipin. That remodeling of the cardiolipin is going to occur naturally, but if you are in an environment that the mitochondria feel is unsafe, so when you think about being stuck in a CDR one cell danger response in that first stage of a cell danger response, one of the characteristics of that stage is that you’ll actually pull in saturated fats into the cardiolipin to protect oxidation of those polyunsaturated fatty acids. So the body does do that to protect you in doing that, it creates a very stiff, rigid membrane, which is going to impact the proteins, your ability to make ATP and make water. And ultimately all of the functions that I spoke about that are involved on that mitochondrial level. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but hopefully it did.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:16:13):

Can you get phosphatidyl ethanolamine or cardiolipin from food or can they be synthesized from food or do you need to get them from supplements?

Justine Stenger (01:16:22):

No phospholipids are found in foods. Absolutely. So I mentioned egg yolks are an excellent source of phospholipids, particularly phosphatidylcholine. So you are going to get phospholipids from any animal foods, any red meat is a really great source. Dairy is a good source, fish is a good source. And then I would say egg yolks are probably in the number one place. And I will also say that I don’t think you can get therapeutic amounts of phospholipids from whole food if you are somebody that is looking to heal from the cell danger response, restore to the health cycle. And if you are living in the world today, I really believe that we need that extra support. And just to give you an example, an egg yolk has about 80 to a hundred milligrams of phosphatidylcholine in one yolk, half a teaspoon of the body. Bio phospholipid complex contains 1300 milligrams of phospholipids and

Kelly McCann, MD (01:17:42):

Eggs.

Justine Stenger (01:17:43):

Like I mentioned before, a tablespoon is what I typically recommend is more of a maintenance dose. So I don’t know anyone that could eat that many eggs.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:17:52):

No, no. Like 40 eggs a day, but I don’t think so. Go for it.

(01:17:59):

That’s a lot of eggs. Okay. What about vegetarian diets?

Justine Stenger (01:18:05):

This always gets me in trouble, and this is an answer that is coming from a membrane medicine stance. A vegetarian diet does not provide the essential nutrients that are required to support healthy membranes. Bioavailable animal protein is absolutely needed,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:18:29):

Especially if somebody is ill.

Justine Stenger (01:18:33):

And even just going back to the different metabolic shifts, if you’re following a vegetarian diet, you’re going to be stuck in MTOR. You’re going to be stuck in a summer metabolism all year round. And so it never wins me a lot of fans, and I also don’t want to be dishonest.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:18:53):

I understand. What are your current thoughts on C 15? Many seem to suggest that they feel better with higher levels.

Justine Stenger (01:19:05):

This is also going to get me in trouble. I need to choose my words. So C 15 from fatty 15, the company, this is a synthetic form of pento decanoic acid. It is not an essential fatty acid despite what the company tells you. It can be synthesized in the body. It is abundant in full fat dairy and it’s synthesized from short chain fatty acids. I personally am not a supporter of using a synthetic supplement over whole food ever. So I don’t recommend it and I don’t use it. And I have felt a little bit disheartened by the messaging behind that supplement, and that also would be a reason why I wouldn’t recommend it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:20:05):

Okay. David says, I’ve been eating just chicken butter and green bananas due to major food sensitivities. Am I missing major fatty acids and making myself worse this way?

Justine Stenger (01:20:19):

Yeah, you are. And it, I’m assuming that you have mast cell activation syndrome, and so it’s really about not being hard on yourself and worrying about this stuff. It’s about understanding what you need to restore the health cycle so that your body is not thinking everything is a threat. And so just know that you can restore all of your fatty acids and your phospholipid profile when you get back to that health cycle. And I’ve seen that. I can’t even tell you how many times. And I am also a living, breathing testimony of someone that had terrible mast cell activation syndrome for years and was living off the medicle chocolate protein powder for a year. So I have been there and really believe that you’ll be able to get back to health by doing the right things.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:21:17):

Yes. Are you saying that seed oils like canola oil are industrial oils and should be avoided?

Justine Stenger (01:21:25):

Yes. 1000%. Yeah. Corn, cotton seed, canola, soy, sunflower ella, grape seed oil, rice brown, brown oil, avocado oil. These are oils that you do not want to be consuming ever, ever, ever. And you don’t even need to worry about it when you’re consuming a whole food-based diet that’s local and seasonal. Those foods have one ingredients and you get to create a beautiful meal in your kitchen with those single ingredient foods. So yeah, nothing that’s processed would be what I recommend. Outside of the slight processing of the body, bio balance oil that is cold pressed, no hexane, no solvents, no bleaches, no deodorizers. Every batch is also tested for oxidation. So very, very different. But yeah, I’m absolutely saying avoid any form of industrial seed oil.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:17):

So you don’t cook with oils then, like grape seed oil for example?

Justine Stenger ():

No.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:24):

Do you cook with butter or lard or?

Justine Stenger (01:22:28):

If I’m cooking with a fat, I cook with a saturated animal fat, so I’ll use duck fat most often. Or usually I use duck fat or ghee on occasion. I don’t love the taste of ghee. I don’t cook with a lot of fat. I make a lot of soups and stews and you know roast chicken with seasonal vegetables. So I don’t buy myself cooking with a lot of added fat. Occasionally I’ll do a little bit of butter if I’m doing some sunny side up eggs on low heat. But yeah, always saturated fats, never an oil for.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:05):

Okay. And you get your duck fat from your local farmer or something like that?

Justine Stenger (01:23:12):

Yeah, I do. I get my food from a farmer who sells me food out of the back of his van.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:18):

Okay, awesome. Is it possible that some people are prone to omega six deficiency? I have had severe long covid and got significant improvement in symptoms by increasing omega sixes after testing and decreasing omega threes. But omega sixes are still consistently low.

Justine Stenger (01:23:37):

So it could just be that your demand is higher, that your body needs more omega six, and that’s going to vary from individual to individual. So I would definitely recommend supporting your body with more. And you may get to a place where, remember the priority is going to be pulling in these polyunsaturated fat acids to support the membranes. And so if you’re needing a lot more to repair and restore membranes, then that could be just a short term thing until you get back to a better state of health. And that’s also why this is a good example of where testing can be really important because it’s hard to give general recommendations. There are some people that just need a lot more and there’s some people that need less as well.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:28):

Do you have recommendations for people who are allergic to nuts, seeds and legumes? Is it possible to get the required fatty acids only from animal foods?

Justine Stenger (01:24:37):

Yeah, it is. I would just say that you need to go a little bit heavier on the egg yolk because egg yolks are a really great source, like I mentioned, of linoleic acid as well. And so you can support your essential fatty acids using egg yolk and liver organ meats are also a great source of the omega sixes. Liver actually contains di homo linolenic acid. That fatty acid I was talking about that’s intimately connected to supporting immune modulation.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:07):

Great. Jay asked or he said wonderful. Talk questions for both Justine and Kelly. What other non body bio supplements are good for mitochondrial health? I’m especially curious about your take on mito Q, the mitoquinol and the urolithin a, mito pure and magnesium malate.

Justine Stenger (01:25:31):

Do you want to go first?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:35):

No, you go ahead.

Justine Stenger (01:25:39):

I probably have a very different perspective than a lot of people in this realm, and I also don’t think any of those are bad or wrong. I don’t necessarily subscribe to mitochondrial nutrients. I again believe in giving the body exactly what it needs to do the work that it was intended to do. And so creatine is one that I would say I actually list creatine right under the phospholipid complex and the essential fatty acids. So I would say creatine. That’s an amazing mitochondrial supportive supplement because that’s going to help to support the recycling of ATP. And there’s tons of research showing that that is supportive even for our brain health and such as well when it comes to some of those other targeted nutrients. Again, I think there’s a time and a place for a lot of them. I just want to emphasize that thinking that you can take a targeted nutraceutical to improve mitochondrial functioning is looking at the mitochondria through the wrong lens from what I understand, because you don’t really know your body is manipulating energy production based on your state of health. And so do you think it would be a good idea if you’re in a cell danger response where your cells have strategically down-regulated a TP production to protect you? Do you think it’s a good idea to try to push mitochondria that are dysfunctional? I don’t think it is. And again, there may be many people that disagree with me, and that’s okay. I just don’t think that we know enough about the mitochondria to be able to say that uro litan a improves mitochondrial functioning.

(01:27:39):

That’s my take.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:27:42):

I think I’ll just leave it at that since we’re running out of time and we have so many questions, and that was a brilliant answer. It would be interesting to hear you explain for the possibility of ongoing deficiency and why. Oh, we kind of already. We tackled that one. So we’re not supposed to heat the good oils. Olive oil, avocado oil for cooking.

Justine Stenger (01:28:06):

No, no. Avocado oil is, I got so much flack on a post that I did on Instagram on avocado oil because when you look at the research on avocado oil, avocado oils in industrial seed oil, almost all of it is processed with hexane. And the way that you can get insight into knowing if the fatty acid chain has been manipulated is just looking at the bottle of avocado oil. So avocado oil like Kelly had mentioned, is rich in oleic acid. It’s an omega nine fatty acid. It has one double carbon bond, and so it’s more stable than a polyunsaturated fatty acid, which has two or more double carbon bonds, and it’s still susceptible to oxidation through heat, light and oxygen. And so if you look at the bottle of your avocado oil, it’s going to say that you can heat this oil to a temperature of 500 degrees between 450 and 500 degrees is typically seen on the bottle on the label.

(01:29:03):

So right then and there, you know that something has been done to that oil to enable it not to smoke that insanely high temperature. So not only would I never recommend cooking on at a temperature that hot, and you just know a monounsaturated fatty acid can’t withstand that kind of heat without oxidizing. I’ll also say that just clinically, this is just observational, that when you take patients off of olive oil when they’re cooking with olive oil, and of course we’re giving the phospholipids and the essential fatty acids, but they’re melan aldehyde markers, so that’s a marker of lipid peroxidation comes right back down to normal. So we can consume oxidized oils. We can also oxidize oils in our own home through cooking if we exceed the smoke point of that specific oil. So that’s where I just always say it’s safer to cook with a saturated fat.

(01:30:02):

It’s safer to cook at a very low temperature, low and slow. Think traditional cooking methods, soups, stews, stir fries, sautes, those are going to prevent glycation or advanced glycated end products and also protect the fatty acids in that food. So we can also oxidize saturated fat if we are cooking a steak on the barbecue at 550 degrees. And so again, this isn’t black and white. I don’t want to be coming across as if you’re monger. This is what we do most of the time is going to determine our health. So I’ll be the first person to say that I love a barbecued steak in the summer, and I don’t worry about that at all. It’s just that we don’t want to be cooking food like that all the time. And when it comes to the fats and oils, you want to be really cognizant of smoke points because a fat or oil goes from being medicine for your body, true medicine to poison just by one step. So those are things that you just want to be aware of, and the whole avocado oil conversation is one that gets me in a lot of trouble and also becomes very obvious when you just understand the characteristics of these fatty acids.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:31:21):

We have a ton of questions, but I’m sure that we won’t get to them all. Let me see. Could you explain the cholesterol paradox, LDL, ApoB total cholesterol? Are these markers typically more related to blood sugar health than actually your fatty acid intake? I mean, she didn’t say that part, but I’m assuming

Justine Stenger ():

It has nothing to do with your fatty acid intake. So PC regulates the entire cholesterol system, the cholesterol feedback system. So your body will, where do I even start with this question? I could go down like a million rabbit holes. So this whole cholesterol and heart disease connection I think has been completely and totally debunked, but maybe people,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:32:19):

But not by the conventional cardiologists still believe it. Many, many, many people in the world still believe it, so don’t assume that people understand that.

Justine Stenger (01:32:29):

So I must be living in a bubble because cholesterol plays no role in cardiovascular outcomes. Cholesterol can often be viewed as a bad guy because cholesterol will be found when there’s damage. Cholesterol is going to go and patch up that damage. So you will find that in

Kelly McCann, MD ():

Find it there, but just because you find it there doesn’t mean it’s responsible for the cardiovascular disease. Right?

Justine Stenger (01:32:56):

Yeah, exactly. And just so everyone is well aware, and you can go and encourage you to go look up these studies, don’t take my word for it, but higher cholesterol is correlated with longer health spans, specifically in women. Higher cholesterol is strongly correlated with longer health spans and lifespans actually. So

Kelly McCann, MD (01:33:17):

Unless it’s being oxidized,

Justine Stenger (01:33:19):

Yeah, just think about the award-winning pharmaceutical companies that are able to tell you that cholesterol is a problem and give you a drug to lower it. That’s the world that we live in. So PC does regulate the entire cholesterol feedback system. And so if you have damage to your membranes and you have really low levels of phosphatidylcholine and your body’s not able to synthesize phosphatidylcholine rapidly enough to go in and repair that damage, what’s going to happen is the liver’s going to upregulate cholesterol production and then LDL is going to take that cholesterol to the cell membrane to patch up the damage. So again, your body’s always doing its very best to support you. And of course, that’s not what we want because the more cholesterol that we have in the, we need cholesterol in the membrane, it’s essential. But if we have too much cholesterol, that’s going to create this very rigid inflexible membrane, and we don’t want that.

(01:34:15):

We want this flexibility and fluidity in the membrane. It’s a really beautiful dynamic membrane. And so by supporting the body with pc, we can help to support that whole feedback loop. So now your body can take a breath. It knows that it has the phospholipids to go in and restore damage to the membrane. It can downregulate that excess of cholesterol production, and that’s obviously supporting LDL as well. And then just to speak to the specific is a main component of every single one of those lipoproteins. And so I always think small oxidized LDL, yes, inflammation, the potential for them to break on those vessel walls. And we can support those small oxidized LDL with phosphatidylcholine so we can create these big buoyant LDL particles. So I think that maybe I answered the question.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:35:14):

I think you did. Okay. I think you did. I think that we could keep talking for another three hours. I’ll start to do a Joe Rogans podcast and we’ll just talk for three hours. Oh my gosh, Justine, I don’t know if you want to take a quick view of the questions and see if there’s any ones that stand out that you just want to answer. Oh, you have a book written about all this amazing information. When is your book coming out, Justine? Oh my gosh.

Justine Stenger (01:35:55):

Okay. Do coconut oil. Coconut oil. This is a good one. I want to actually just quickly address this. So coconut oil is high in capric acid and coconut oil. First of all, it is a tropical oil. So if you’re not living in the tropics, I don’t recommend coconut oil. And if you are using it on occasion, you want to make sure that you keep the temperature low for cooking because coconut oil is a saturated fat, but it actually has a low smoke point. Smoke point is about 350 degrees. And so you want to coconut low temperature. And coconut oil is very high in capric acid. And capric acid will really, really fudge fatty acid metabolism. It just kind of screws up fatty acid metabolism when it’s elevated. So we don’t want to have super elevated levels of capric acid. And I do see that in people that are using coconut oil regularly to cook. So again, once in a while, keep the temperature low. Not a big deal. If you’re making a paleo bread or something, it works well and just put it on Bake 325 and you should be good, but you don’t want to use it. You don’t overuse it or use it too frequently

Kelly McCann, MD (01:37:07):

For iPhone Number three, what is balance oil? Balance oil is a specific product from Bit Bio, and that’s exactly what it’s named. Let’s see. Oh my goodness. So many good questions. Favorite references, favorite reference text? Oh my gosh,

Justine Stenger (01:37:35):

I have books everywhere here. I have so many. Send me a message on, I can send out a list In terms of mitochondrial health, I would say definitely get Doug Wallace’s textbook. It’s not like a fun read, it’s very academic, but it’s a whole textbook full of his research, which is amazing. Nick Lane’s book, sex Power and Suicide Amazing, mind blowing. Jim Al’s book, life on the Edge, amazing Light Sculpting Life. Amazing. Why am I forgetting the name of the author? I should know that I have a million book recommendations if Amazing. Wants to reach out.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:38:28):

Okay. So where can people find you, Justine?

Justine Stenger (01:38:33):

I am most active on Instagram. I do an educational reel pretty much every day. And so you can follow me @JustineCellularNutrition. My website is justinestanger.com, and I’ve got lots of stuff on there as well. And then Body Bio, of course is bodybio.com. And they are @BodyBio on Instagram and Hoffman. Yeah. Yeah. You can also, Bruce Hoffman’s, he’s on Instagram as well @DrBruceHoffman. He actually puts out an amazing content. He’s also at thehoffmancentre.com. Is his website

Kelly McCann, MD (01:39:18):

Center spelled the Canadian Way, not the American

Justine Stenger (01:39:21):

Way. Yeah. Center is RE, not ER. Yeah, exactly.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:39:26):

And so you can also check out our website, thespringcenter.com, as well as drkellymccan.com. We do have the Body Bio PC on our website. So if any people are interested. And of course you can also look at Body Bio. They have their own website as well. Oh my goodness. This has been just so, so cool. We’ll have to do this again. Super

Justine Stenger (01:39:55):

Fun. Super, super fun. And thank you everyone for being here. It has been fun to spend this time talking all things mitochondrial medicine.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:40:04):

Absolutely. And for folks who are interested in popping in on our next webinar, it is what’s the 22nd? And we are talking with my nutritionist, Sarah, how to get through the holidays, things like that. All things yummy food for holidays. And we will hopefully continue this thread of whole local food, finding your favorite farmers to work with. Okay. Thank you so much, Justine. Michelle, if you can grab all the questions and you can before I stop recording, that would be fantastic. Just in case there are any nuggets in there that we want to make sure we put in the replay and there will be a replay available. Just watch for your emails sometime next week and we’ll have the transcripts. And we’re so grateful for all of you and grateful for Body Bio for supporting this webinar series today.

Justine Stenger (01:41:15):

Well, thanks again for having me, Kelly. Have a great

Kelly McCann, MD (01:41:17):

Week. Thank you everyone. Take care. Bye-Bye now.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Rick Martin of MicroGen DX on our most recent webinar. Rick and I dove into the cutting-edge science of Next-Generation DNA sequencing (NGS), a 21st-century method of detecting and diagnosing bacterial and fungal infections. We discussed how NGS has helped patients all over the world find answers to their suffering, low-level inflammation, and suspected infections, and exactly which types of patients would benefit from this incredible technology. Whether you’re a practitioner or patient, you’ll want to listen to this astounding and relevant conversation! Thanks for tuning in!

I’d also like to give a special thanks to MicroGen DX for sponsoring this webinar. We’re so grateful for their partnership and support.

Click here to learn more from Rick Martin and his team at MicroGen DX. Rick can be reached at rick.martin@microgendx.com.

To work with Dr. McCann and her team, please visit The Spring Center’s website here.

Recommended products from the conversation with Rick:

• Boluoke
• BioFilm Defense 
• Nattokinase
• Evvy Vaginal Health Test

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:02):

Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to spend an hour or so with my guest, Rick Martin and myself. I’m so happy that you’re here. Let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. I’m so excited to have him. This is a company that I just love, and I had the pleasure of meeting Rick a number of months ago, and we just had a fabulous time. So I know that you’re really going to enjoy our time together today. So Rick Martin is the owner and CEO of MicroGen DX, which is a next generation sequencing company that specializes in identifying different microbes, especially right now, bacteria and fungus. And this is super important when we’re dealing with chronic illnesses, chronic complex bacterial and fungal infections. And he’s going to tell us all about how this works. A little bit more about his background.

(00:01:08):

He purchased MicroGen DX from the founder, Randy Walcott in 2016. It was called Pathogenesis at the time. And he ensured Dr. Walcott, that he would continue the mission of using next generation technology and make this as available to people as possible. Prior to purchasing MicroGen DX, he was the CEO and founder of Apollo Healing Technologies. He’s also worked for Pfizer in various countries throughout the world. Turkey, Spain, the UK was the sales director in Europe and Canada, and he specialized in antibiotics. So he’s uniquely poised to run MicroGen DX because antibiotics are used to kill microbes. And then prior to that, he was in the US military as an officer for 12 years. Thank you so much for being here, Rick.

Rick Martin (00:02:03):

Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure. I’m looking forward to the discussion with your audience.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:02:08):

Thank you. Okay, so let’s talk about next generation sequencing and kind of give the history of that so the audience really understands how cutting edge this technology is and how behind the times use of culture is.

Rick Martin (00:02:32):

Yeah, I think mean this is a revolutionary change and it’s highly disruptive to human medicine because I think most people when they’re faced with an illness, whether it’s a urinary tract infection or a chronic sinus infection or some type of dermatological skin infection, and you go to your doctor and the doctor, you just think, well, I just needed antibiotic or maybe an antifungal. But obviously the physician needs to know what type of bacteria or what type of fungus is causing your condition or your infection. And right, since for hundreds of years, literally, they’ve relied on the whole idea of sending a sample off to a traditional lab that would try to grow those microbes in Petri dishes. And if we think about it, it’s pretty archaic. It’s been around since the 18 hundreds, but it’s still how medicine determines what’s there and what antibiotic I need.

(00:03:33):

Because essentially if you need to know the type of micro, because not all antibiotics or antifungals are designed to work against every bacteria or every fungal. So your physician really needs to understand what they’re treating to be able to prescribe the right class of antibiotics or what type of antifungal you need. And often the traditional culture methods come back and if it does grow something and then it’s treated, but you don’t respond as a patient. And it’s often because the traditional culture methods aren’t really giving the full picture of what’s there. And if it comes back negative, which urinary tract infections, it’s going to be anywhere 40 to 60% of the time, it’s going to be culture negative, which then leaves your physician with the dilemma of, okay, I know you’re infected because you have other indications that they’re infection. You have symptoms, you have elevated white blood cell, so you’re clearly infected, but I don’t know what’s causing your infection, so I’m going to give you this antibiotic and see how you do.

(00:04:36):

That’s called empiric treatment. And if it works, wonderful, but often it doesn’t work. And so we now have the ability not to, we don’t have to grow the organism to try to identify them. We can. Every microbe has its own unique DNA. So every bacteria, every fungus has its own unique. We all have our own DNA that’s unique to us. Each organism has its own. And so now we know what the DNA for each of those species is. We have a database of 57,000 bacteria and fungus. So now if you send us a sample of urine, we can take the urine, we can extract the microbial DNA from the urine, and we can match it to a library of sequence codes. And we can tell you with DNA precision exactly what’s there. So now your doctor can prescribe the right treatment, the right class of antibiotics because they know exactly what’s there.

(00:05:32):

Or maybe it’s not a bacteria, maybe it’s a fungus, and you’ve been treated with antibiotics and you haven’t gotten better. And all of a sudden our test says, well, it’s not problem. It’s not bacteria, it’s a fungal. So then now you get put on the right antifungal. So that’s essentially what NextGen sequencing is. It’s a form of PCR. Everybody knows PCR Now thanks to Covid, the one thing we learned from COVID was PCR technology, but PCR is very limited to whatever you have genetic signals that you’re looking for. It doesn’t tell you everything, it just tells you what you ask it to look for. So it’s a bias test to what you ask it to look for, or next gen sequencing is essentially an unbiased, we don’t care what’s in the sample, but we’re going to take and match it to the whole universe of organisms. Hopefully that wasn’t too much, but

Kelly McCann, MD (00:06:27):

Yeah, that’s perfect. I have a gardener outside, so I just muted myself just in case I That’s perfect. I really remember when we did our TV spot you talking about the different Petri dishes and how you had to have a culture medium that was going to grow specific kinds of bacteria. And so in order to really do the test properly, we need culture medium for gram-negative bacteria and gram-positive bacteria and fungus and all of these different Petri dishes to grow it. That would be more accurate of a culture, but just really not effective, particularly when it’s an archaic technology. And even the PCR, I’m just thinking about, okay, here’s a little probe for e coli and here’s one for enterococcus and here’s one for enterococcal or whatever. And so we’ve got these half a dozen probes, even a hundred probes, and we’re asking, okay, is this organism in your urine? Is this organism in your urine? Yeah. And we have found some really funky organisms, both fungus and bacteria in people’s specimens, and it’s been extremely helpful. So tell us about some of the instances. We’ve talked about urine, but what are some of the other instances where this technology has really been applied and been extremely useful?

Rick Martin (00:08:09):

Yeah, I mean there’s obviously with any new technology, physicians are trained to be skeptical, which is good. You want them to be able to see evidence in science. And so we have spent a lot of time energy focused on what we call closed space infections, like orthopedic infections. If you get a new knee or hip implant put in, you have a very small incidence of it getting infected, but when it does get infected, it’s really devastating to you as the patient. And so we’ve done a lot of research on those types of infections, and we’ve shown that traditional culture methods don’t identify all the organisms causing the infection, therefore you don’t get treated correctly and you’re at risk for amputation and for losing the function of that leg for life. So that’s one area we spent a lot of our research on was orthopedic infections.

(00:09:08):

We’ve done a lot in urologic infections for both UTIs and reoccurring chronic UTIs and even IC, which a lot of women are put into this category of IC because their urine cultures are negative and they just assume that they now have this interstitial cystitis problem. And it’s really, I think it’s we’re going to change that whole diagnostic criteria because cultures are often negative. It doesn’t mean there’s not a microbe there causing it. We’ve done a lot of work in sinus infections, recurrent chronic sinus infections. You might’ve had sinus procedures, but still after the surgery you’re still getting headaches, you still have inflammation, you still don’t feel well. Again, it’s because the microbes have basically changed in your sinus tract, and so you really need to understand what new microbes are there, skin infections. What else? I think there’s a lot of future studies coming to show that your gut microbiome is going to be impacting a lot of illnesses from cancer to Parkinson’s.

(00:10:18):

We’re seeing research that your oral microbiome in your mouth is actually related to the development of plaque that causes Alzheimer’s and dementia. So it’s really fascinating the amount of insight we’re learning about our gut microbiome, which makes sense because we’re essentially, I tell people the bacteria in our bodies outnumber the host cells and essentially our skin is like a bag of bacteria. And so holding all this bacteria, and we have microbes on our skin, we have ’em in our sinus and our urinary tract in our gut physicians used to were trained that the urinary tract was sterile for years. And I still run into physicians that think the urinary tract is sterile. I’m like, it’s not. I mean everybody, even healthy people with no urinary tract infection, you have microbes in your urine and it makes sense because again, your body has a large population of microbes and you need them to survive. If you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t survive. So they’re essential, which is why you see a difference with people that take probiotics and things that improve their gut health. It really improves their overall health. So I think we’ll be moving our technology into really helping understand the role of the gut microbiome because you can’t use a culture technique when you’re trying to understand what the diversity of organisms are that you have in your gut, and you really need this type of technology to understand a complete picture of what’s there.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:48):

Yes, I definitely want to get into the gut, but first, let’s dive a little bit more into the urine and the prostate too. I mean, I think that when we’re doing culture, I’m sorry, when we’re doing the testing on my patients, we’re looking at women and I’m having them do the women’s kit, so we get the vaginal swab and the bladder swabs. And now fortunately, you guys are actually indicating which organisms, at least in the bladder are commensal organisms. Can you explain that concept to our listeners?

Rick Martin (00:12:30):

Yeah, sure. As I said, the urinary tract has its own microbiome, and when you get a urinary tract infection, it’s essentially what’s called a dysbiosis or a shift in the community that’s there. And so when often, if you have sex, you’re basically sharing the microbes from your partner, they cause it a diversity change in the urinary tract microbiome. For men, we think when you have a prostate infection, many of them get just treated for what they think is the e coli that causes it, but it’s essentially there’s a broad range of microbes that cause these prostate infections. So we can take a semen analysis, a urine analysis, and tell exactly what’s there. Remind me again what your original question. I started talking then I lost.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:13:26):

That’s okay. It’s okay. Yeah. I wanted to know about commensals because

Rick Martin (00:13:33):

Yeah, on the report, the report, we have a new column that essentially has whether the organism is a pathogen, whether it’s a commensal or whether it’s unknown, we don’t know yet. And why that’s important is because obviously if we have microbes in our urinary tract, we don’t want to treat the good bacteria. We want to target the bacteria that are known to play a pathogenic role. That means they literally have been shown in research to cause infection. Now, I think that’s limited. It’s very limited based on traditional culture and what was shown to be pathogenic. We had a case with a woman that had a recurrent UTI where we found a bacteria called and the average physician and some microbiologists would accuse us of basically finding a commensal or normal microbe. But when you research the literature, we found that actually it was an emerging pathogen that causes urinary tract infections in women.

(00:14:36):

But if you look at the literature, it’s all based on culture techniques. So it’s really important for the physician to have to, when they’re looking at what we find, if we find seven or eight species in your urine, which ones do we target? Which ones are the, so what we’ve done to help that is we’ve looked at all of the research for every single species we’ve found in urine. And to date, we found over 6,000 bacteria in human urine. So the nice thing about AI now is AI can actually help you mine through all of the research and look and see is there any studies to show this specific species causing infection. And so through AI tools, we’re now able to show that which bacteria is a known pathogen. So it just helps physicians interpret our report faster because it’s a huge shift for physicians when they get our report with six or seven bacteria on it versus the culture method, they might get a e coli and that’s it.

(00:15:36):

And the lab, it’s really ironic because your bacteria is growing in a Petri dish and then some lab tech decides what to report to the physician. So they might see other organisms on the plate, but they just said, you know what? I think that’s just contamination or mixed flora. I’m not even going to tell the physician what’s there. I’m just going to tell them this most abundant one, which is e coli. And that might not be what’s causing your infection. But if our report has multiple species, we can help physicians interpret the report by giving them an AI-based research tool that says, here’s what we found. These two lactobacillus species are commensals, don’t worry about them up. Ah, here’s Klebsiella pneumo known pathogen should treat this one.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:16:24):

Right? Yeah. We absolutely find a ton of Klebsiella species in people’s urines. It’s really crazy. Obviously if it’s named Klebsiella pneumonia, you think it would be in the lungs, but it’s a pathogen no matter where it shows up. In an ideal world, we would do women and men who are couples who are having intercourse because they’re swapping species. Correct.

Rick Martin (00:16:57):

Yeah. We’ve had, actually, I have one physician who’s over a hundred cases of couples where the women kept coming back recurrent. And then this physician just basically said, can I treat your partner? And so I shouldn’t say, treat your partner. Can we diagnose or we send a sample in from your partner. And sure enough, he found known pathogens in the urine or the semen analysis from the male treated those. And then he actually reported this research at one of the big meetings and essentially found that this made a huge difference and that they didn’t have the recurrence of the infections.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:17:36):

Right. And I definitely have some couples who have both been doing the tests, and even if they’re being really careful and not having intercourse or using condoms, we’re still plugging away at some of these infections. Which brings me to the idea of biofilms. Can we talk about biofilms? What are they?

Rick Martin (00:17:58):

Yeah, I think this is a fascinating topic. Dr. Walcott really educated me because he spent his career understanding and researching biofilms. And the easiest way to explain biofilms are a community of bacteria or a collaborative community. In other words, they all like to work together. So if you can imagine all these different bacterial species coming together in the lining of a tissue or the bladder wall, and they can form anywhere in your body, they can form on a piece of hardware on your heart valve, on a joint they could form. And essentially what they do is they come together as different species and they’ve known through evolution in literally billions of years of being in existence that if they want to survive, they have to come together and work together because our bodies are designed to try to kill them and eradicate them. So it’s almost like I saw a really great video.

(00:18:57):

Dr. Walcott shared with me one time of a one single species of bacteria in a white blood cell coming along like Pac-Man, just eating it. But as soon as the bacteria had a cluster of other bacteria and the white blood cell came along, it just bounced off. It just couldn’t penetrate. So these organisms basically are really smart. They form this community and they build a wall around themselves. It’s a polygalactin it’s a matrix that they build because essentially they want to live and they want to survive. And they’ve learned that if they can do certain things, they can prevent, and they’re not literally selective as to who they let in the community. I mean, biofilms can be with gram-negative bacteria with anaerobes, aerobes, they can be with fungal species. They’re like, the more the merrier come on into our community. And the problem with that is now typical systemic antibiotics.

(00:19:52):

If your doctor gives you an antibiotic by mouth or IV and you have a strong biofilm community there, it’s going to be really hard for the antibiotics to penetrate it, or you might need antibiotics for an extended period of time to overcome these. In chronic wounds, we do debridement, which is a physical disruption of the biofilm. So you literally go in there with a scalpel or a 15 blade and you literally scrape it out, and now that’s weakening the community. But it’s also amazing how fast they can replicate. You literally can eradicate it and it wound bed in 48 hours later. It’s back to full strength again. So you don’t always get everything, and that’s why you have to use multiple strategies to win against them, whether you’re using systemic antibiotics, topical antibiotics, biocides and wounds, all these things that can help kill the community and wipe out the community.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:20:46):

I liken the biofilms to almost like a jello matrix, but I think when I’m thinking about it in the bladder, it feels like a lasagna. So you’ve got the pasta, which is kind of the biofilm, that’s the force field that protects the bacteria. And then you’ve got the meat and the cheese sauce, and that’s all the bacteria and the fungus, and then you have another layer, and then you have more bacteria, more fungus, more layers of the biofilm. And that’s really how it feels as a clinician and as a patient as we’re walking through this process of poking the biofilm and breaking down the biofilm and then finding what’s underneath it.

Rick Martin (00:21:31):

Yeah, that’s a great analogy. I’ve used also a house. So if the community is a house and you go in and you basically take the roof off the house, you uncover what’s on the second floor of what bacteria are there, but you haven’t got to the basement yet, and so you just keep taking chunks out of the house. But you find different communities at different levels within the house, and they’re essentially, the walls are there, what they’ve built to try to protect themselves.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:22:03):

So some other ideas for people to visualize what biofilms are. Think about the plaque on your teeth. That’s a biofilm. Think about scum on a pond. That’s usually different bacteria that’s biofilm. When you have a glass of water is my glass of water, and you leave it sitting and you let the water evaporate, and then there’s that film around. That’s the matrix of the biofilm that’s left behind. So there biofilms are everywhere, and as Rick said, they’re all over our skin. Anywhere there’s bacteria, there’s biofilm and biofilms are not necessarily bad or good, correct?

Rick Martin (00:22:51):

Yeah. I mean if they’re forming communities in our gut, then they’re doing something maybe in a positive role. It’s when they move into areas where they normally, you shouldn’t have a microbiome. You shouldn’t have within your bones or within your joints. There shouldn’t be a community of organisms living there. So you don’t want biofilm. Even in our sinuses, you could have a biofilm form in your sinuses and your body basically deals with it and there’s no host response. But at certain points, whether you all of a sudden you get a virus and your immune system is weakened, when all of a sudden that community might explode and become stronger, the census of that community will change. And all of a sudden your body says, oh, we don’t want them here. Now the white blood cells come running through the site and your body now starts to react, which is inflammation, which is everybody. When you’re dealing with an infection, you have that inflammatory response, which is essentially our body’s way of trying to get rid of them.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:23:57):

Right. And so one of the things that we do along with using your test is we use proteolytic enzymes that break up the biofilm to help really uncover what’s there. So we’ll use things like biofilm defense or Boluoke. For some sensitive patients, I might use nattokinase, even though that’s more of a fibrinolytic. And I was taught that from one of the consultants that you guys have utilized Ruth Kriz, and can you speak to using the biofilm busters along with the testing?

Rick Martin (00:24:45):

Yeah. Actually on the bladder wall for example, you could have, as time goes on, the more time you give the organisms, the stronger their biofilm community comes. So it’s really the really important that you get diagnosed correctly and get treated quickly because each time that goes by from a failure to treat the infection correctly early on just gives the bacteria time to get smarter and stronger and the community, the biofilm to become stronger. So if it’s in the bladder wall, for example, now you take systemic antibiotics and they don’t work and you still have the pain, you have inflammation, you have your host response to this community and your bladder wall. So we, we’ve worked with doctors who will now use our tests to identify who’s in the community, what species, and now they can use antibiotics delivered locally. So instead of taking it by mouth or iv, you now put ’em into an irrigation or installation and you run it into the bladder.

(00:25:55):

For example, what does, it delivers really high concentrations of antibiotics right there at the site of the community or the biofilm, and you break it down and then you basically, maybe sometimes the first application is enough to eradicate the community, but often like Ruth Kriz is going to do is she’ll do this topical delivery and then retest. And again, it’s kind of breaking down the house analogy where all of a sudden now we’re discovering other bacteria that are now coming out and then maybe retreating again with another irrigation or installation and chronic wounds. It’s been amazing the results where we know in all wounds that these biofilms form, and what we can do is identify all of the bacteria or fungal in the community and then treat them again with topical antibiotics. And it makes a lot of sense in wound care because people that get wounds are often diabetics.

(00:26:54):

They have poor vascular, poor blood flow. And so I’ve often said to physicians that who don’t want to treat topically? I’ve said, well, this person already has really poor blood flow and this wound is at the bottom of their foot. The chances of you getting high enough concentrations of an oral or IV antibiotic into overcome this biofilm is going to be really, really difficult. So if you just take those antibiotics and put them into a base, a lipid-based carrier, for example, and lay them directly on top of the bacteria, it’s like delivering 5,000 times the concentration of killing that you would never achieve if you took that antibiotic by mouth or iv because it has to go through your liver and your kidney and it would kill you at those concentrations. So the whole idea of topical is in the next area, we see it a lot with biofilms in the sinuses.

(00:27:46):

Rhinologists, ENT doctors will take a sample, send it to our lab, and then send our report to a pharmacist to make a customized irrigation to run through the sinuses. And we’re actually doing a study right now with Harvard, one of the top rhinologists in the nation, and she fully believes in this idea, but we’re going to be now producing the evidence to show how much better it works. So I think the whole application of understanding biofilms with DNA technology, it’s far more precise and then allows you then to target exactly what’s there. And you don’t always have to use antibiotics. You can do other things as the products you have that were, anything that’ll start to break down the matrix and wound care, you can use biocides. Those are basically things that kill bacteria. So there are other things that you can use to decrease the bioburden or the amount of bacteria there at the site.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:28:45):

Thank goodness. Yes, we actually do a lot of sinus swabs as well. Many of our patients are mold exposed, and we’re finding that mold really changes the microbiome of the sinuses and the nasal passages. And so it’s super important to get those swabs. There is a mold doctor who started teaching everyone all the functional docs about mold, and he was really fixated on one single organism that he called Marcons, which was a multi antibiotic susceptible coag negative staph or staph epi. And I’m not quite sure why he fixated on that one, but that was the one that he thought was the problem child when patients were mold exposed. But what we’re finding using next generation sequencing is that it’s so much more complicated than just marons in mold patients. Many of them will be colonized with different sorts of fungus as well as numerous bacteria.

(00:29:58):

There’s a family of bacteria called Corynebacterium species. They’re otherwise known as actinomycetes and those are very common in our mold exposed patients, and they can get in the sinuses as well as the bladders. I’ve seen them in bladders too. So I love that we have this technology to really pinpoint. And the cool thing about the sinus cavity too is we’re trying to do topicals. So we do try and avoid the systemic antimicrobials whenever possible, combining them with different substances that will break up the biofilm, like EDTA or even xylitol can be very effective in a nasal spray. So that’s been a game changer for sure.

Rick Martin (00:30:50):

Yeah. I remember years ago I had a physician call me and she had a female patient that was feeling lethargic, wasn’t feeling good overall, and did full work up on all her blood work and all the lab values were really abnormal, and she was even going to get ready to put her on a thyroid medication. She said, well, let’s just take a sample from your sinuses. I want to send it to MicroGen and just see if you have a normal flora in your sinuses or there’s something going on. And sure enough, she came back with really high levels of aspergillosis in her sinuses. So the minute she treated that, she told me that literally it was like 180. It was a huge change, and all of a sudden her lab values all came back to normal. She didn’t have to put her on any kind of thyroid meds, and it was all because her whole immune system was out of whack because she had really high levels of aspergillosis, which is a mold in her sinuses,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:56):

And unfortunately she probably needed to get a mold inspector out to her house and find the source of the mold and deal with that. It was just going to come back.

Rick Martin (00:32:07):

We had that case too in Atlanta where an infectious disease physician that worked closely with an ENT group using our test, and both the mother and the daughter came back with high levels of osis, the same mold, and he asked them, tell me about where you live. And so they were described that they just recently moved into a new apartment, but it was renovated. And he said, well, you should probably have a home inspector go out and take a thorough look apartment. And sure enough, they did and found out, and during the renovations, they had a separate area that they walled off. And when they looked behind that, literally that whole area was covered in mold. So they were essentially living in mold and didn’t realize it. It was actually made the news in the one of the local Atlanta channels, but highlighting how this mother and daughter living in this environment was all uncovered because our technology was used by the ENT physician and the id.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:33:15):

Thank goodness there are doctors out there using it these days. Let’s talk more about the oral microbiome. So I know that there’s a dental test that you have. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Rick Martin (00:33:31):

Yeah, we had certain dentists and periodontists that were approaching us about some of the infections that they see, implant related infections, biofilms forming on the implants, difficult to eradicate. And so we started doing studies, compare our tests versus traditional culture methods, and obviously the culture methods were missing a huge range of organisms. We just have so much bacteria and microbes in our mouth. And then we did a really interesting study to look and see if what was the best way of collecting a sample, whether you just spit into a cup or if the dentist will use what’s called a blunt needle, and it doesn’t sound very nice

Kelly McCann, MD (00:34:22):

That sounds…

Rick Martin (00:34:22):

To do, but essentially they go under the gum line with this blunt needle and they collect a sample. And so we actually tested dental floss to see how dental floss would perform with saliva, blunt needles, and actually the dental floss performed really, really well. We think in the future we’ll be able to have people just that they want to know what their oral microbiome is. They can basically take floss, floss their teeth, and then put it into a sterile cup and send it to us. And then there are certain microbes that are associated with health issues like plaque formation for Alzheimer’s, patients gingivalis and I thought everybody had p gingivalis in their mouth. So I had about a thousand oral samples in our database. And so I had my team go back and look and say, okay, what percentage of the people did we actually find peach gals? And it wasn’t a hundred percent, it was only 15%. So it’s really interesting that that 15% that has high levels of p gingivalis are really more at risk for development of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:35:35):

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I recently did one of the dental floss tests on one of our patients, and I have to say it was a little confusing to figure out what to do about the organisms because I looked all of them up, and most all of them were associated with increased risk for periodontal disease, but that didn’t really help it narrow down for me what I needed to do about it.

Rick Martin (00:36:05):

Yeah, I think even when I said was talking to a friend who’s a microbiologist at MUSC in Charleston, South Carolina, and he was showing me the literature about this tie from p gingivalis to Alzheimer’s, and I said, gee, I had that. I have a huge fear of obviously getting Alzheimer’s or dementia. And so I said, is the answer, I just start using Listerine every day? And he said, no, no, that’s the worst thing you can do because you’re going to wipe out all the other bacteria in your mouth and that just will lead to a cascade of other health issues. So we need a microbiome in our mouth, but the question is understanding what species are related to what, and there’s a lot of research still to be done to understand that. But yeah, the interpretation of what we find in your mouth, and it also prevents some doctors that want to use our test for diagnosing lung infections, but when they go through the mouth to collect the sample, they’ll pick up a lot of the typical flora like strep mighty and those species that are there.

(00:37:13):

So they have to be able to go down our list and say, well, I know this pseudomonas is a known pathogen, so no issue. You found that there. I’m going to treat that. So we have a lot of work to do in terms of helping interpret the results from the samples taken from your mouth. Even from years ago, my kids had a science project every year, and so one year I said to my daughter when she was looking for ideas, I said, let’s compare the microbes that you have in your mouth versus the dogs that we have. And everybody thinks, I said, what’s the hypothesis? Whose mouth has more bacteria, dogs or humans? And she thought, humans. I said, okay, we’ll find out. And sure enough, we took samples from our dogs and from her and her brother, and the amount of bacteria in our dogs was like three times what you find in human mouth.

(00:38:09):

So you definitely don’t want your dog licking even your cat. We had a fascinating case of a woman with a hip infection that cultures were negative, they couldn’t figure out what was causing her hip infection. They sent a sample off to our lab. We found a pasture species that’s only comes from the mouths of cats. And they went back to the patient and they said, do you own a cat? And she said, yes. And the cat was licking her and biting her. And so literally the microbe from the cat’s mouth transferred, got to her hip and created a massive infection in her hip,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:38:46):

How terrifying and how amazing that she had access to the technology that saved her life.

(00:38:53):

Truly. Wow. That’s really impressive. I just want to speak, I know somebody has their hand up. I know there’s a bunch of questions in the q and a in the chat. Rick and I are going to talk for a few more minutes because he has so many cool stories. I do want him to be able to share some of those before we dive into your questions. If there’s questions in the chat, if you could put them in the q and a, we’ll go through all of them. And Paula, with your hand raised, if you want to put your question in the q and a, I’ll make sure that we answer that. And what else did I want to say? So yeah, we’ll get to you guys, I promise. Let’s go back to the gut microbiome and how next generation sequencing might be helpful for practical purposes for research purposes to move the needle of our understanding of the microbiome.

Rick Martin (00:39:54):

Yeah, I think, I mean, there’s ways you can, essentially, you want some fecal matter for analyzing your gut microbiome, but we even can take a swab from fecal matter from the toilet paper. But yeah, that fecal matter is what we’re basically extracting all the microbial DNA. There’s still a lot of work to do in terms of interpreting all of that because when you get our report from a fecal sample, it is going to be a lot of bacteria. So the future is going to be looking at analyzing large sets of individuals, and I was having a discussion with one physician that literally you could take really superstar athletes and measure their gut microbiome and then compare it to other people’s gut microbiome and see what’s the difference between high performing people, athletic people versus the average person. So I think the more we learn about the understanding what specific microbes are tied to certain types of patient populations, we’re doing that a lot now with urine.

(00:41:02):

We’re doing cluster analysis by region, so we’ll be able to see what type of microbes are in different populations around the country. We just did that with wound samples and found diversity between patients that were in wound care centers in the northeast versus the south west and so forth. So you actually, we’ve seen that there’s difference in the microbial community even by weather patterns. So all of these things that impact the microbes, the world microbes, and that we’re then collecting in these different patient samples and starting to, the more samples we have, the more data we have, the more we can start to mine that data and get a better understanding of what it all means.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:41:48):

Oh, yeah, that just kind of blew my mind. Think about the patients who have been in hurricanes and the patients who have been in tornadoes and the patients who are in snowstorms. What does that do with your microbiome on your skin? Anyway, crazy ideas. Tell us some of your favorite stories, the most unusual, favorite stories about this technology and how amazing it can be.

Rick Martin (00:42:16):

Yeah, I mean, the patient success story is what really motivates me. I mean, often days with, we have a lot of skeptics on questioning the utility of the technology, but that’s slowly going away as more and more evidence accumulates. But when I hear this patient success stories, it’s really rewarding. I remember one in particular police officer from Texas that called our customer service center and said he just wanted to call and thank us for saving his life. And we said, well, how did we save your life? He said, I dealt with a chronic prostate infection for more than two years. He had been to multiple urologists, he had had multiple exams, he had so many different culture results and so many rounds of antibiotics and nothing was working. And he had told his wife that he didn’t want to live his life in pain. I’ve never had a prostate infection, but I’ve talked to many patients that inflammation is really painful.

(00:43:12):

It makes it even sitting is miserable, so I can only imagine what it’s like every day going through and being in pain. So he essentially said he didn’t want to live anymore, but then he went to a urologist that knew about our test, sent in a urine and semen analysis, got him on the right antibiotics, and he said to us, since I’ve had your tests and been treated correctly, I’m symptom free and I’m so grateful. So wouldn’t have, again, I was thinking about ending my life. I didn’t want to live in pain anymore, so thank you for saving my life. So that was definitely one that always has stuck in my mind. But I get cases all the time from physicians that are calling patients in the ICU, that literally they don’t know what’s causing their lung infection. We had a case just published by University of Florida of a woman with Whipples disease that was undiagnosed.

(00:44:07):

They sent a sample of her lung tissue to our lab. We picked up the Whipples, the species associated with Whipples disease that everybody else had missed. And so it’s many, many chronic wounds that I’ve seen that were non-healing and used our test and were able to get the patient correctly and close the wound. Literally, these patients are so grateful that our technology, because they often go to a physician and they’re told this wound will never heal. I mean, you might as well just get on with your life and get it below the knee amputation. And it’s like really? I mean, that’s your choices, and you see it all the time. The amputation rates for diabetics and with chronic wounds is just way too high and it doesn’t need to be that high. Yes, they have to have good vascular blood flow to be able to heal, but there are things they can do to improve that blood flow.

(00:45:08):

And there are ways that you can, we’re getting ready to publish a new study looking at these wounds that were defined as palliative care, which means they don’t think they’re ever going to heal, and then all of a sudden they use our tests with topical antibiotics and they heal. So those are some of the women that we’ve had that have had recurrent chronic UTIs that basically the, and I’ve heard some stories recently. There’s this one group that literally women have committed suicide because they’re told by their doctor that they’re not infected. It’s in your head. Go to a psychiatrist, get prescribed an opioid for pain and deal with it. And I know I’ve talked to many physicians urologists that when they see these women or these men coming with these reoccurrent infections, they don’t even want to deal with ’em. They want to hand them to somebody else because they don’t want to fail, but they’re relying on old archaic culture technology that’s not able to precisely identify what’s causing the infection. And when they get seen by physicians that use our test, it makes a huge difference.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:46:20):

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty powerful. I do remember a story that you shared about a young boy. I think he had a brain abscess. Can you share that story and then we’ll go take some questions?

Rick Martin (00:46:40):

Yeah. It was a 14-year-old that was from Madison, Wisconsin. He went to the Caribbean on vacation with his family, went swimming and came back to Madison and had multiple ER visits. And he eventually ended up in the ICU and had cerebral spinal fluid infection in his brain, and they were drilling holes in his skull to relieve the pressure from the inflammation. He had all the diagnostic workups. He was being put on very broad spectrum antibiotics. Nothing was working. They told the parents that their son was probably going to die, but they wanted to do one last test, and they sent cerebral spinal fluid. It wasn’t our lab, but it was a university lab in California that was doing next gen sequencing using DNA. And lo and behold, they found a bacteria called leptospira, which is found in the waters in the Caribbean, mainly from cat feces.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:47:40):

Those darn cats.

Rick Martin (00:47:41):

Yeah, this bacteria, the only thing that works against it is high doses of penicillin. You can imagine this 14-year-old boy if you’re in the ICU, I have three kids, if they were in the ICU, you’d be telling the physicians to use the broadest spectrum antibiotics, antifungals, throw everything at them to save their life, and that wasn’t working. And the reason why is because he needed high doses of penicillin. And you think how ironic the oldest antibiotic known to man, you’d never use it in a really critical case in the ICU, but that’s what he needed. So the minute they had identified the bacteria, they said switched him to high doses of penicillin, fevers came down, saved his life. He’s now, this made the headlines of the New York Times in 2014. It was made published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I met the physician who owns the lab, and he basically said that Steven calls him every year and thanks him for saving his life. I think I lost you. Oh, there you’re back. You’re muted though.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:48:56):

Whoops. So sorry. What a cliffhanger. I don’t know what happened. I was even hardwired. So did you finish the story? Please finish the story.

Rick Martin (00:49:07):

Yeah, I did. I said basically he saved his life and the patient’s name was Steven, and he calls Dr. Chu, the physician who was running the lab and thanks him every year on his birthday, he calls him and says, thank you for saving my life.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:29):

Sorry about the technology. Now it’s unstable. We’ll try this again. Okay. So let’s take some questions, shall we?

Rick Martin (00:49:44):

Sure.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:45):

Okay. Hi Scott. Glad you’re here. Does next generation sequencing provide any insight as to whether or not SARS-CoV-2 may persist in the body?

Rick Martin (00:50:01):

Yes. You don’t need next gen sequencing. You can use a PCR primer for the virus, but you can measure viral load at different sampling from different parts of the body to see if you still have a certain load of the virus still there at that site. So there is a lot more and more research long covid where essentially the viral load is being maintained in different sites, whether it’s the lung or finding it in the saliva. I don’t know all of the samples where they’re still finding it, but obviously they find it in your gut microbiome. So they’ve even been able to use this technology for genetic testing or genomic testing for cities in their sewer systems to be able to see how much they still are finding.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:57):

Yes. I think Dr. Sabine Hasan, who has a stool testing company, was working on some of those things. Let’s see. When using next generation testing for sinuses, do you generally see more fungal or more bacterial overgrowth?

Rick Martin (00:51:17):

It’s more bacterial, and we, we’ve getting ready to publish exactly what we’re finding. What’s really interesting in the top 10, it’s dominated by anaerobic bacteria. So anaerobic bacteria are very difficult to identify using traditional culture methods because they’re bacteria that don’t need oxygen. So they’re really hard to grow. They’re slow growers. But essentially the sinus samples are showing that our sinuses have a lot of anaerobes. They do have fungal. We pick up a lot of different fungal species, and there’s controversy with the RHINOLOGISTS and ENT. I disagree with them, but some earlier work that said when they treated fungal that they then think it was playing a pathogenic role. I’ve talked to too many doctors who have identified fungus, treated it, and the patients have responded wonderfully to the eradication of the fungal.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:12):

Yeah, I have to disagree with that strongly too, knowing my moldy population and the fungus that we’re seeing. But yeah, I definitely find a lot more bacteria than fungus. Can you give the listeners an idea of what anaerobic bacteria are? They might’ve heard of

Rick Martin (00:52:32):

One. We see a lot is called finegoldia magna, that it’s actually named after Sydney Feingold, who was a microbiologist at UCLA. He’s the one that first identified it. Bacteroides fragilis another common. I could go on and on, but there’s a lot of anaerobes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:54):

Okay. Just in case people wanted to know. Let’s see. For those with chronic Lyme, does next generation tend to support vector-borne infection diagnosis, or point in different directions? Great question, Scott.

Rick Martin (00:53:09):

Yeah, Lyme, we get a lot of requests about Lyme. The challenge with Lyme is that is having it in the sample. The species that’s associated with Lyme, we can identify it, but if you get bit by the tick in the first and you got us a blood sample within the first three weeks, we would be able to detect it. But then after three weeks, it’s normally going and it’s seeding someplace in your body. So if it’s in the joints or in your bladder, then we have to get a sample from those sites to be able to detect it. And so a lot of the tests that we do for lys are going to be negative because the sample was urine or was a swab from the sinuses or blood. And essentially, if it’s not in the sample, we won’t find it.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:57):

Right. I obviously have a lot of patients in my practice with Lyme and other co-infections, and we’re sampling mostly urine and sinuses. I have not yet found any of the tick-borne infections in any of those specimen. I think they’re probably in the tissues in other places. Does biofilm breaking interventions increase the potential to find organisms in next generation sequencing?

Rick Martin (00:54:27):

Yes. Again, if you’re using anything disrupting the biofilm, if it’s a complex layer of organisms, it’s interesting. We’ve had cases in the sinuses where they’ll do a swab and they’ll pick up things like typical gram-positive and gram-negatives like pseudomonas and staph epi. And then as they go down deeper into the slime or they scrape it off with us in surgery and they send us those samples, it’s almost all anaerobes because those are the deep bacteria that are deeper down in the biofilms that don’t need oxygen.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:59):

Yes, I definitely have found that if we’re not using biofilm busters, we don’t make as much headway and getting down through those layers. So I think someone asked, can MCAS patients tolerate some of the biofilm busters? You’d be surprised. I obviously have a practice filled with mast cell patients, and we are able to use some biofilm busting, even if it’s just a little bit. And things like, especially if it’s a sinus, things like x-clear and xylitol are generally pretty well tolerated by people. So we can do some things to help with mast cell patients and breaking up the biofilms. How about using next generation sequencing to identify parasites in stool, and is that better than other technologies available today?

Rick Martin (00:56:00):

There’s a type of next gen sequencing. It’s called full metagenomic or shotgun sequencing. We don’t offer that for our normal regular clinical samples. Now we do what’s called the Amplicon 16 s, and for bacteria and ITS for fungus, we don’t pick up all the viruses and we don’t pick up the parasites. However, we can do the shotgun or full metagenomics. It’s basically looking at a longer range on the gene. So where you can find pretty much everything, that is definitely going to be the direction that the whole sequencing is going. We offer the shotgun sequencing for certain companies. There’s a company called Evvy that does vaginal microbiome, and we do shotgun sequencing for their samples. We do shotgun sequencing for corporations that want shotgun sequencing, they want a broader range of identification. So we do that for companies like Johnson Johnson and Proctor and Gamble and others. But our standard tests that you would order now would not uncover parasites. But if I have requests from physicians that have a suspicion of a parasite, and we will run it on a separate platform that we have, but since it’s not a validated test, I have to issue the report as a research only within, probably by next year, we will be offering the full shotgun sequencing in our standard clinical samples. So it’s not far away.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:40):

Very cool. So envy the commercial tests that you can buy yourself, you actually run the next generation sequencing on for them?

Rick Martin (00:57:50):

Yes.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:51):

Good to know. Very interesting. That’s really cool. So somebody joined late, Rick is associated with MicroGen DX. They do next generation sequencing. Okay. God, what I’ve done without you, Scott, you’re asking all the questions. So I mentioned this too. So Richie Shoemaker is a mold physician, and he’s recently started focusing on Actinobacteria, which is the cranium bacterium, the propan acnes, and all the different cranium species. How often is that seen in next generation sequencing? Have you paid attention to that?

Rick Martin (00:58:37):

Yes, quite often, especially we do a lot of orthopedic samples. Shoulder infections are that’s the dominant key acnes or acute acute bacteria. Acnes is always the number one species that they’re most worried about that causes the most infection. I even designed a PCR primer for it because our next gen sequencing takes three to four days on average. So, but when you do PCR, it’s very quick. So we designed a primer for C acnes to be able to identify it within hours. But yeah, in our NGS, we also pick it up and see a lot of it. It’s also very typical of skin, normal skin flora.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:59:23):

Right. And yeah, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve been seeing it in people’s bladders. We’ve been seeing it a lot in mold exposed patients, sinuses. And then it is another way for my team to start looking at actinomyces in the home and on the skin just to see if that could be a role in a source patient. How do you sample hip or other joint areas as well as the pathogens With dental implants?

Rick Martin (01:00:00):

For hip, we do either an aspiration where the surgeon will stick a needle into the knee or the hip and draw fluid and send us the fluid. But the optimal sample is if they have to do a, what’s called a revision surgery where they go in basically clean and take out the old implant, then we have them collect multiple samples. It’s pea size, tissue fluid. We actually give them a piece of sterile gauze and have them wipe the gauze across both host tissue, bone and also the implant. And so we want them to maximize surface area because we don’t know where them organisms are. We even use swabs and the traditional way of collecting samples from micro, they frowned upon swabs. They would just use a big chunk of tissue to the micro lab. But we found that even the swabs were, if the community of bacteria was down in the femur canal, unless you literally went down there with a swab or something to collect them, you won’t find them.

(01:01:03):

So we did a lot of testing on different sample types to measure what was the optimal yield. Tissue is the highest yield, but swabs were right up there in terms of sensitivity. And even the gauze works great in terms of, it’s just logical. If I use the analogy like a crime scene. If you go to a crime scene and you’re looking for human DNA, the more surface area that you collect from, whether it’s doors or doorknobs or whether it’s tables, more area you search, you’re going to pick up more human DNA and in an infection, you need to go in and basically maximize the surface area for the area you’re looking for. The organisms, if they’re grossly infected, like a grossly infected knee or hip, you’re going to find it in the fluid because there’s just so much bacteria in there. I mean, I’ve seen videos where they literally open up the hip and it just gushes out a amount of bacteria, but that’s very extreme cases. Often it could be an infection caused by a small colony that you have to collect them. And the mouth, again, we looked at saliva versus blunt needle versus floss. The dental floss is the best way to get a good yield of microbes from your mouth.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:02:21):

Yeah. I have a patient I saw this week. She has an infected tooth. It’s caused all sorts of problems. It’s caused, it seems to have been correlated with a tachycardic brady kind of syndrome. It’s caused growth of her thyroid nodules and

Rick Martin (01:02:43):

Sinus Infections too. It causes,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:02:45):

Yeah, sinus infections too. So she’s going to have the tooth removed, and I gave her, not a dental kipa, just a regular old swab to tell the dentist, just get in there and swab around, get as much goop and yeah, the surface area. That’s great. So thank you for that. Let’s see. Is the sensitivity that’s listed on the test result based on actual culture sensitivity or analysis of the data on the, I guess not culture, but analysis of the data of the organisms? Or is it from the medical literature?

Rick Martin (01:03:23):

It’s not a phenotypic sensitivity, which is what I think they’re referring to. It’s where you actually grow the organism and you measure how it responds to different antibiotics, which is usually called a zone of inhibition. And so that would tell you whether it’s sensitive, it’s resistant or intermediate. We’re not doing that type of phenotypic sensitivity. We’re not growing anything, we’re doing genotypic, which means the reason why the antibiotic doesn’t work against that bacteria is because it acquires a certain gene that basically turns that antibiotic off, makes it ineffective. And so we look for those genetic markers for resistance. But when you see on our report, the antibiotic list, that that’s a research base. So if it’s a bacterial species that we’ve identified, we will tell you what the research has shown, which class of antimicrobials works against it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:17):

And then with the genetics, the resistance genes, we don’t know. We don’t know which organism has those resistance genes. So

Rick Martin (01:04:29):

We just know within the sample they have. But we also know bacteria share.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:35):

Very true.

Rick Martin (01:04:37):

And there’s also what they called expressing the gene. But again, if the community of bacteria is challenged with an antibiotic and they have the ability to counter it, they’ll use it. So I think that’s without question that they’re going to, if they have a way of preventing themselves from being killed, they’re going to use it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:59):

Okay. This one is a little bit more involved. How much biofilm breaking is ideal? How many different biofilm breakers, dose frequency, and the number of days leading up to the collection will result in the maximum accuracy detection of the test?

Rick Martin (01:05:19):

Oh, that’s almost, I’m not familiar with the one. It depends on the length and where the biofilm is and how long you’ve had it to, how complex it is. Again, the longer they’ve had it, probably the more, the stronger, more complex, more difficult to eradicate and kill. And you would probably, at that point, if it’s really, they’ve had it for a long time, then it’s going to take a while to overcome it. And that would probably, you need multiple tests. That’s what I know physicians that are dealing with, like Ruth Kriz who you referred to, if she’s dealing with some of these chronic type of infections, she is testing using biofilm busters and then testing repeatedly to see how it’s working and there is a change in the community. But in terms of Exactly, I have no data or science to say and there’s just too many variables that would be impacted. I mean you could take, if Ruth or any physician treated a hundred patients this way, you could do the analysis, the change of how many tests that each patient had, what was used in the change in the community, how long it took from first test to eradication and return to normal. But it could be done, but I don’t have it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:06:48):

Yeah, and I’ll speak to what we’re doing clinically in the office. Most patients were suggesting people do five days of biofilm busters and using kind of a standardized biofilm defense, this guy or disrupt from research nutritionals to kind of get us started in doing the test one capsule twice a day for five days. Now for some people, one, they can’t tolerate it, or two, the biofilm is really resilient and resistant. If they have a hypercoagulability state, that’s going to mean that fibrin is being deposited in the biofilm two. So I have to take that into consideration. So balu is often used synergistically with my biofilm busters to get the fibrin open up. So for example, I’ll use myself, I did my five days of biofilm defense, did a urine specimen, nothing. Well, I’ve got PI one and PI one gene variant, which means that hypercoagulable, I actually decided to take the biofilm defense for a couple of months, repeated the test, and I definitely found some organisms after that. So we don’t have the science yet. It’s the art still in the art of medicine and how the clinician and the patient do that conversation to try and figure out what’s the best biofilm buster, what’s going to break up these specific organisms that we suspect are there and how can you tolerate it? And we just do the best that we can in trying to get the information that we need to make your clinical decisions.

(01:08:48):

How about this one? Do we have any insights from swabbing skin in those with Morgellons? Are you familiar with Morgellons, Rick?

Rick Martin (01:08:56):

No, I’m not.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:08:57):

Okay, alright. I don’t know either, Scott. We’ll have to ask somebody else. Morgellons is a skin condition often associated with Lyme disease where little pieces of colored filaments, particles, strands, I forget the term filaments. Thank you. Come out of the skin. It’s a very debilitating condition. Okay.

Rick Martin (01:09:29):

You could take a scraping of those and send those for us to understand what exactly microbial makeup is, what is actually there. I just had another call today with another physician. The same thing with a patient with a skin dermatological issue that was not responding and she wanted to send a sample in. I said if there’s any exudate or oozing, you could collect that on the swab. If it’s a very dry skin condition, you could take our swab and moisten it with sterile saline because a moist and saline swab will collect more microbial DNA from the skin. Or if you can scrape it, you can do that. I mean, I had a case, actually my wife years ago, had an outbreak on her chin and went to a derm and thought it was acne and prescribed her doxycycline. She was on the doxy for three months, I think it wasn’t improving.

(01:10:28):

And then she went to her, GYN had some blood work, her immune system was all out of whack because of the doxycycline. I told her to stop the taking the doxycycline. I took a scraping of her chin and sent it to the lab and one of my PhDs called me laughing and said, is your wife howling at the moon? And I said, what do you mean? He said, have you not seen her report? I said, no, I haven’t seen it yet. And I pulled it up and she had three common species that are only found in the mouths of dogs. And we had a puppy and the puppy was licking her face. So the bacteria from the dog’s mouth created this skin infection that doxy didn’t work against. The minute we put the right antibiotics topically on her skin, literally it took like or five days to clear. She was very mad at me. I didn’t do it earlier.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:11:19):

You were in the doghouse with the puppy. Oh dear. Let’s see. Does MicroGen DX distinguish between the urine of avoided specimen, catheterized specimen, super pubic obtained specimen, and does it matter

Rick Martin (01:11:39):

Actually, when you do a clean catch, you are going to get vaginal for women, you’re going to get a vaginal microbiome in the samples. You could pick up lactobacillus, the ideal catch would be a catheterized catch, but that’s not always easy to do. But there has been studies to look and see, is there really a difference between catheterized and clean catch and depends on the technique. You have clean catch too. You really want to avoid the skin contaminants with men. We tell them to clean the tip of the penis with an alcohol wipe to try to remove the contaminants like staph epi or some of the normal skin microbiome. But yeah, the idea would be a catheterized catch. There is going to be differences, but a lot of doctors don’t. They do a clean catch, they’ll treat based on clean catch. If the patient’s still not responding, they’ll do a catheterized collection.

(01:12:48):

You froze.

(01:14:07):

You’re back.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:14:11):

Yeah, I’m never doing webinars from my home again. This is terrible. I’m so sorry everyone. Yeah, like I said, I was even hardwired, so things are not working very well. Alright, where were we? Oh, apparently I’m not even a panelist anymore, so I can’t answer the questions. Ask the questions. Let’s see.

Rick Martin (01:14:39):

Well, looking for that, I didn’t add that. The bearing of this technology was cost and time. A lot of people have a perception that it’s really expensive and it was expensive. I mean, the few labs that we’re offering at Nationwide were charging over a thousand, $2,000 a sample. So we’ve disrupted the market by bringing the price point down significantly. Medicare covers our tests at $350. That’s what we charge. We charge hospitals $350. So it’s actually compare it to three different culture plates. It’s actually less expensive than aerobic, anaerobic and fungal cultures. But I just wanted to make sure that I said that because a lot of people have a perception that they hear molecular and they hear NextGen sequencing and they associate it with being really costly.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:15:29):

Yes. I think your prices are really reasonable. I don’t know how to get those questions back. Okay.

Rick Martin (01:15:43):

I can see my mind. I think the last,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:15:45):

If you could see them on your, if you don’t mind reading them Rick, and then answering them. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to click anything. Hopefully Michelle can,

Rick Martin (01:15:57):

It said lasts. How long do you usually do antibiotics with busters for stubborn infections, e coli and Klebsiella? Is it continuous or breaks? Anything else that helps? So I think the whole idea of doing continuous antimicrobials or intermittent antibiotics, but I’m not in the treatment side. I’m in the diagnostic side. So that would have to be for Dr. McGann

(01:16:29):

Or she froze. Again,

(01:17:25):

One question. Are there doctors using this for UTIs on the east coast? Yes. We have physicians around the country that are using it. So there are, if you called our customer service center, we would tell you what in your area who’s actually using it. Sorry, I was just reading the questions while you were gone. Yeah,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:17:49):

No, thank you. I’m so sorry. We’re having big internet issues in my home. Yeah, I don’t know what to do.

Rick Martin (01:18:01):

I can read, you can

Kelly McCann, MD (01:18:03):

Keep reading the

Rick Martin (01:18:04):

Questions. Do you think herbal antimicrobials are helpful for gut bacteria overgrowth such as H dash PL Rix and U 58? That’s to you.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:18:23):

Oh, so

(01:18:28):

I think that we’re starting to get together a database for different kinds of anti-microbials to see what would be helpful. I’m relying pretty heavily on Steven Bruner’s herbal antimicrobial book to start. It’s actually, we’ll see. I think it may be a combination of some prescription antibiotics along with some pretty aggressive biofilm busting and longer duration of herbals. And then we’ll just have to repeat testing and see. I know when I’ve talked to some of your colleagues or your employees, Rick, that there has been discussion about coming up with an herbal antimicrobial database for some of the testing. How does that look these days?

Rick Martin (01:19:36):

This is the first time I’m hearing a bit, so I’d have to get back to you.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:40):

Okay. Alright. Blame

Rick Martin (01:19:43):

Challenging. It sounds challenging, but if there’s a way to do it, we’ll look at it.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:50):

Yes. Steven Bunner, B-U-H-N-E-R. He wrote an anti, he’s a long,

Rick Martin (01:20:03):

Oh, you froze again.

(01:20:17):

There was a question about using this comparing difference at medical facilities on outcome versus standard cultures. And we have done those studies. We’ve shown that in UTI studies that it was urine was split, half went to a micro lab for cultures that went to US symptom scores came down faster on the patients that had our tests and were treated based on our tests versus traditional culture. We also just published a huge study in lithotripsy, which is kidney stone surgery, which is one of the most common surgeries that urologists performed. And we did a study with at University of Texas with 220 patients and essentially patients that got urine culture prior to surgery had an 8% infection rate. Patients that got our test prior to surgery had one infection. So it was massive statistical differences in outcome. So we are doing those outcome studies to show that our test definitely makes a difference in outcomes. We’ve done that also in chronic wound studies where we showed the patient group that got our test with topical antibiotics had a 68% reduction in cost to treatment of a diabetic foot ulcer and took the healing time from 170 days down to 32 days. So there’s really good evidence and data to show that this technology combined with targeted antimicrobials makes a huge difference in outcomes.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:21:56):

Hi, I am back for a minute. Hopefully

Rick Martin (01:22:01):

I was just answering another question while you were gone.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:03):

Great. Yes, thank you. I’m so glad that you have better internet than I do. Who knew? I would be hardwired and at home and still have problems. And you’re\

Rick Martin (01:22:13):

On my cell phone in my car

Kelly McCann, MD (01:22:18):

Technology. Okay.

Rick Martin (01:22:22):

There was a question about what certain species of bacteria, if we can find ’em with nng s The answer is, I get this all the time. I have to look for each of the species that you’re listing in your question. But again, we have a massive database, so I could probably have my guys query the database to tell you exactly how many times we found a specific species and what type of sample we found it in, whether it was in urine or whether it was in swabs or sinus or blood. But yeah, we have that capability to tell you exactly how many times we found a species. Our future reports will actually have that added as we see a species. We’ll tell you grandpa and then we’ll tell you how many times we find it in that type of infection.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:11):

It’s very cool stuff. What are the,

Rick Martin (01:23:17):

They’re saying ahead. She said that one person said, turn off your video. I know that does sometimes help with the data that you turned the video off. You might not use as much and you might not be disconnected.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:23:29):

I think it’s, well, my husband is home too, also doing calls as well, and so he’s on it. It’s just dropping and yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not, if stopping the video will really help, I can do that if you want. Let’s see. Bandwidth related. Okay, I’ll stop the video. Maybe that’ll help. Alright, since you’re following where your questions are, do you want to keep asking the questions?

Rick Martin (01:24:04):

It said Dr. McCann, can people use just the

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:10):

Lumbrokinase?

Rick Martin (01:24:11):

Lumbrokinase? Yes.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:13):

Yeah, that’s the boluoke. That’s another name for Boluoke. So yes, you could use just lumbrokinase if that’s what you tolerate

Rick Martin (01:24:24):

Prior to testing. That’s what she’s,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:24:25):

Yes. Yes. We do suggest that everyone does a biofilm buster protocol of whatever they can tolerate for at least five to seven days before they collect a test. And then our protocol is that we have people do the biofilm buster throughout the microbial treatment, whether that’s an antifungal or an antibiotic. And then we do what’s what we call a washout period. So for two weeks afterwards they are off the antibiotics and the antifungals, they stay on the biofilm busters for another two weeks and then we have them repeat the test. So we’re really trying to be as aggressive as possible about the biofilm busters to really excavate as much as we can through that biofilm.

Rick Martin (01:25:20):

I’m going to lose my battery here shortly.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:25:23):

Okay. Well, you know what, we’ve been going at this. I think the universe is telling us it’s time. I don’t think that the protocol is listed anywhere on the website. And then the duration of time for the antibiotics really depends on the person and how long we’ve been doing this. So that’s where working with your individual practitioner is optimal. And we’re just making up this protocol as we go and finding what works for our patients. So there may be other ways of doing things that work really well for people. And if people want to work with me and my team, we’re at the spring center.com. That’s the website. I do have medical licenses in about 12 states, so I can see patients in other states who are not living in California, but not necessarily everybody. So it does depend on where you live and where can people find more about you and MicroGen DX.

Rick Martin (01:26:38):

MicroGendx.com is our website. We have our customer number there and info at you can request or if they want to email me, I’m rick.Martin@microgendx.com. Happy to also respond through email.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:26:54):

Awesome. And Michelle is available at info@kellykMcCann md.com and she can answer questions about becoming a patient as well. If you are interested in the Boluoke, the Bio Film Defense, Nattokinase those are available on the website, the spring center.com and in a couple more weeks just FYI. We are also going to do a webinar with Justine Stenger, I’m sorry, from Body Bio. She’s going to be talking about all things cell membrane mitochondria. She is a wealth of information and that’s going to be a super fun one. So that’s the November 8th. I think we’re doing it at same time, same station promise. I’ll have better wifi and internet next time. And so we will also be sending out the replay. Hopefully all of it will be recorded, even though I kept losing connection. So hopefully you get Rick and all his amazing answers and we’ll put that, that’ll be available next week. Michelle will send that out with a full transcript so you can see all that information. Thank you so much, Rick, for your time and expertise. This was really fun. Sorry about the technical side of things, but I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Rick Martin (01:28:26):

I did too. Thank you. And thanks for having me on. It was great.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:28:30):

You’re welcome. Thank you everyone. Take care now. Bye-Bye. Till next time.

Chat Transcript

It was such a pleasure to host Lyn Patrick, ND on our most recent webinar. She is such a wealth of knowledge! We covered all things related to clean water and air along with important toxins you need to know about. We also discussed why and how to limit exposures to these toxins as well as what testing is now available. This is one important conversation you do not want to miss– so thanks for tuning in!

To learn more from Lyn Patrick, ND, be sure to visit her at EMEI Global and check out her course called “How to Survive in a Toxic World and Prevent Disease” here.

Check out the replay, transcript, and chat transcript below.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:00:02):

Hello everyone. So glad that you could join Dr. Lyn Patrick and I today, Lyn and I go way back. We just figured out we’ve known each other for 20 years. Oh my goodness. She was my mentor way back in when I was at the University of Arizona’s Fellowship for integrative medicine. She taught me about environmental toxicants and just blew my mind and totally changed the trajectory of my practice and my life. Thank goodness. And I’m, I’m just so glad to have you here, Lynn.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:00:41):

I’m very glad to be here. And as you can see, I’m still here 20 years later as resilient as ever. And as we all know in this world today, in this toxic world, it takes work to be resilient, but it’s possible. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is the possibility of resilience in this toxic world.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:01:04):

Thank goodness. Thank goodness,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:01:06):

Right? That’s hope. I feel like I have to offer people is in addition to treating very, very sick, chemically sensitive patients throughout my career. I also have been a chemically sensitive patient myself. And so I have not only been fortunate enough to receive treatment, I’ve been fortunate enough to offer it and to learn from that. And so here we are in 2024 in an even more challenging environment than we were 20 years ago. So let’s dig in right now. What happened in my world was I have been exclusively talking to doctors and educating doctors from all spheres, not just functional medicine docs, but just regular conventional physicians who feel like they miss something in their medical education and they’re not sure what it is, but it has something to do with environmental exposures. And so I started teaching metal toxicology. Some people call it heavy metal toxicity, but aluminum’s toxic metal, and it’s very light, so we call them toxic metals.

(00:02:23):

And I started realizing that there was a huge chasm in medical education related to toxic exposures. So I tried to fill that gap. And then East Palestine happened, east Palestine, Ohio, I’m sure everyone in the world knows about the train derailment and the burning of the fuel in those rail cars That then became a toxic cloud This year in 2024, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, which is probably the strangest agency you’ve never heard of, I had never heard of it, and I even study and teach this stuff. It’s the agency that goes around the country gathering soil samples and looking at exposures based on what’s in the soil. Well, they did the entire country, mostly on the east coast, to try to see if they could pinpoint what happened to those toxic clouds that came up from the fuel car combustion. And they identified an area with 100 million people in it, 16 states, imagine the Midwest and the East Coast and the Southeast, as far south as the Carolinas, as far north as Toronto, Canada, and all the way to the Eastern seaboard because what they found in the soil was an amount of chlorinated, important word chlorinated molecules that were unprecedented.

(00:04:02):

And they’ve started doing this in the seventies. They started looking at soil samples in the seventies, so they had 50 years of soil samples. And this was published in a technical environmental journal, not just a report, but it was published peer reviewed data. They said, we have never seen anything like this. Something happened that was big, and they were brave enough to say that this is a very big deal. We have to be very careful about what this is and what it means for the people who eat food, drink water, and breathe air in these 16 states, a hundred million people, Kelly, is a third of the American population. There’s 337 million people in our country right now. This is big.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:04:52):

Can you explain, before you go further, can you explain about the chlorinated molecules and why that’s so important?

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:04:57):

Yes. So what those railcars were full of is something called vinyl chloride or polyvinyl chloride. Poly just means a bunch of vinyl chloride molecules stuck together. When you burn plastic, and I’m talking about any plastic, you burn this little plastic container. What you make are combustion products that are very toxic. They’re called dioxins. Dioxins are in wildfire smoke. They’re in house fire smoke. They’re in some industrial effluent, and they were definitely produced by the combustion of that liquid plastic vinyl monomers, like one molecule and polymers a bunch of different molecules. And so literally that smoke, as we know now from the research that came out in 2024, is all over the east coast. So my business, who’s also a physician, and I, her mom, you know her, Dr. Ann Marie Fine. Her mom was a first responder at Ground Zero in New York as a Red Cross nurse who later died of breast cancer.

(00:06:10):

And what people don’t know is that there is a fund to pay your tax dollars to pay cancer victims. From 9/11, more people have gotten cancer and died from the pollution at ground zero than were originally killed when the Twin Towers collapsed. And billions of dollars have been paid out in the compensation fund to the survivors and the families of those cancer victims. And the number one exposure at 9/11 was the exact same exposure as happened with East Palestine. It was dioxin, and there’s the burning of all of the plastics. Think about how much plastic was in the Twin Towers, right? The furnaces, the computers, our buildings have a lot of plastic in them now. That’s just how they’re constructed. That’s just the culture we live in. So when the East Palestine disaster happened, we watched very carefully to see what kind of public health guidance the residents of East Palestine would receive.

(00:07:25):

Would they get air filters? Would they get water filters they could put on their faucet so they could drink clean water? Would they be coached about how to shelter safely inside? Would they be given sealant tape to seal off their windows and their doors? All the things that we know are basic. When you’re exposed to chemicals in a chemical disaster or a chemical accident, they got none of that guidance. The only guidance they got was this will all be over in a few hours. And now the air’s clean. Same guidance. The EPA actually gave us after 9/11, which turned out to be false information.

(00:08:07):

It was a false narrative that the air was clear in New York and people could safely go out. So I think both of us had an epiphany when East Palestine happened. And because Dr. Fine is very keenly tuned in to that whole world of environmental chemical exposures, she knew that there’s one chemical disaster in this country every three days that’s been documented. There’s actually a website for that. And just before I came on with you, we had a staff meeting for our company and we decided we’re going to do an update. So we’ll do another webinar where we’ll do q and a, and we’ll talk about all this stuff. But the important things that we can talk about right now is that we now have to deal with our everyday exposures. We have to understand that we have to do some remediation both in our bodies and in our homes in order to deal with these everyday exposures.

(00:09:08):

I’m going to give, I talk, I think on Saturday for an organization that you’re involved in, ICI to talk about indoor air pollution. And so I did a ton more research than I usually do to get ready for this talk. And I now clearly understand something that our mentor said to us, Dr. Walter Cran. And when you and I were in training, we did a postgraduate year long course in environmental medicine. And he said this, and honestly, Kelly, when he said it, I was like, who? That’s not important metal toxicity. That’s what’s important. Now, I am humbled because I’ve done my homework and my education, and I understand that what he said was absolutely prophetic and true. He said, filtering the indoor air in people’s homes is no longer voluntary filtering. Drinking water. Bathing water, and cooking water is no longer voluntary. We must accept that we have to protect ourselves from what is in our everyday environment and our everyday exposure.

(00:10:17):

And that’s what, so Emory and I wrote a course to help both healthcare providers and their patients and everybody, everybody needs this information to figure out how are we going to deal with these everyday exposures? And I don’t need to tell you or anybody in this audience what kind of health crises we’re facing right now. We all know it. We all heard it during the Senate hearings or the Senate roundtable that was put together by Ron Johnson, Senator Johnson two or three weeks ago. We understand that we’re having a health disaster in this country, and I’m here to tell you that what was not discussed enough during those hearings is not just that our food supply is poisoned, but so is our water supply and our air supply. And so we have to take a look at both of those as well.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:11:15):

And I think a lot of people understand it’s best to eat organic. I need to do a detox. I mean, that’s a little bit more in social media, a little bit more in the mainstream, but this idea that we have to filter all of our air, we have to filter all of our water and then having tools. So that’s really what I hope to leave our audience with, having some tools of how can you afford to do what you can to protect yourself and your families? Because difficult, I mean, I rent, I can’t afford to buy a whole house reverse osmosis or filtration system. So we need some solutions that are feasible for different echelons of

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:12:13):

That’s what our course is about, and that’s what I’m going to deliver. I’m here to deliver the goods, get down and dirty, and really talk about what the solutions are, because I think that’s what we need right now. We just solutions. Right.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:12:30):

Well, why don’t you tell people where they can find their course and then of course, we’ll do it again at the end.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:12:37):

Yeah. The company is E-M-E-I-E-M-E-I global.com. And so we are a medical education company. We just did this because we were both clearly frustrated and angry and we were passionate about this message, EMEI global. In the navigation bar up top it says new course, and then you just click on that and it will say how to survive in a toxic world and prevent disease. That’s the course. I’m going to tell you what’s in the course right now so that we can talk about solutions. Do you want to talk about water first? Should we, let’s

Kelly McCann, MD (00:13:17):

Talk about water. Yep. Here, I’ll have a sip of water and we’ll talk about water.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:13:21):

Yeah. So one of the interesting places to look at what’s in your drinking waters? The environmental working group, the environmental working group, wonderful organization. If there’s any money in my bank account when I kick the bucket, they’re going to get it besides a few friends and family. But what they have put together that is amazing is the tap water database. In the tap water database, you can put in your own zip code and up will come the EPA report for reportable contaminants in your drinking water. This is something that happens every year by law. Your drinking water provider has to send in samples to the EPA. They also have to report contaminants that they see throughout the year that are there in your drinking water, right? So EPA, or excuse me, EWG tap water database. Who cares about this? You should, because you know Kelly and I bet if you put your zip code in, you’ll see, oh, my water is horrible here. The majority of water in this country is contaminated with something called hexvalent chromium. If Erin Brockovich were here, she could talk about hexavalent chromium because there was a whole movie with her name on it about hexavalent chromium in Hinkley, California. The research that I’ve done looking into tap water contamination shows us that 94% of the tap water in the United States of America has detectable hexavalent chromium in it.

(00:15:06):

It’s a reproductive toxicant. If you are planning on conceiving, you should not drink the tap water in your house. You should. And what we’re going to talk about how to get that stuff out, it’s actually not expensive to get hexavalent chromium out of water, but that’s only one of the contaminants. Another major contaminant is uranium. Uranium is found…

Kelly McCann, MD (00:15:29):

And there’s a lot of uranium that’s showing up on the heavy metal toxic metal testing that we’re doing with patients in Southern California.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:15:38):

And I will tell you that is coming directly from tap water. It’s not coming from food. It’s not in the air, it’s in the water supply. And the tap water database clearly shows that there’s a way you can go in there and find out what are the most common contaminants, disinfection byproducts, which are the combination of chlorine and organic like soil bacteria. You put those two together and you get a carcinogenic brew of what are called disinfection, meaning chlorine bromine byproducts, meaning the chemistry that happens in your water system.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:16:19):

Yeah, I’d never heard that term. And after you told me that a couple of months ago, I went and took a deep dive and I was like, oh my goodness, carcinogens, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, it just went on and on and on. The evils of disinfection byproducts, and of course the water treatment plants are intending on doing a good thing by killing the bacteria and the microbes that are in the water, and that’s why they’re putting the chlorine and the propane in there. But unfortunately, it has this adverse effect on us as we ingest or get exposed to those toxicants.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:17:02):

Yes, and to their credit, I happen to get emails in my inbox from the Professional Association of Drinking Water. That’s not their real name. I can’t remember what it is, but all the people that are providing drinking water, they are good people. They are trying to do this in a way that is as harmless as possible, but right now, their technology stinks and they know it. And they’re looking for ozination, they’re looking for new technologies. They’re trying really hard to do this so that their disinfection byproduct levels will be low. In the meantime, we have to take it upon ourselves to filter those out of our drinking water. The other thing we said we were going to mention our perfluoro and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Those are commonly known as the Forever Chemicals. The pfas, PFAS is the acronym for all of those over 4,000 different chemicals that we know as Teflon Scotch Guard, the non-stick, firefighting foam, all of the flame retardants that are in commerce.

(00:18:25):

Those have made it into our bodies. So I was talking to a research scientist recently who said the bottom line is that every human, every mammal, every amphibian, every fish we’ve ever tested has shown the presence of these substances because the fluorine carbon, so fluorine is an element carbon, what everything is made out of stardust, et cetera. As Joni Mitchell would say, that bond is the strongest known bond period. It’s hard to break. And that’s why when the scientists put it together, they were like, Eureka, we’ve got something that is going to be a permanent stain, preventive chemical and non-stick, and all the cookware in the world is going to be coated with it. We’ve just done a good thing for mankind.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:21):

Oh dear.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:19:22):

Okay. That’s also in drinking waters in drinking water.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:19:30):

So before we jump in, I’d like to talk a little bit more about additional testing and what are some of the other ways that we could test that maybe more specific? Because the top, I mean obviously if EWG is getting the reports from the EPA data, it’s all EPA data, and the EPA data base is not really as thorough as we would like. Clearly they didn’t help out with East Palestine, so

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:20:02):

Well, I have to say, Kelly, I know that the EPA is a captured agency just like the FDA. There are so many whistleblowers that have written books about that. I’ve read all of them. And I do think that when you look in your tap water database, you’re going to get good information about the regulated. They’re only

(00:20:27):

20 or so regulated contaminants, but you’re also going to get good information about the PFAS forever chemicals. But you’re right, because what they don’t do is they only test for four. Well, don’t quote me on this. I can’t remember. They only test for a handful of pesticides. There are only a small handful of pesticides that are regulated that they legally have to test for. I just looked this up yesterday. So it’s current information. They will not test for every pesticide that may be in your drinking water. And I’m not just talking now to people who live in rural areas or farming areas. I’m talking to everybody because there are a lot of pesticides that are used in urban areas as well. Air in urban areas has as much pesticide in it as does most rural areas unless you’re actually underneath a sprayer. So you’re right. That’s one place where you may want to get your water tested. But

Kelly McCann, MD (00:21:33):

Yeah, so for example, I just looked up my zip code 9 2 6 7 7 Laguna Miguel, and it says that I have total 17 contaminants and 11 of those exceed the EWG health guidelines, but that’s only 17. When I look at my zero water filter, it’s usually when I use my little device from zero water, which we can talk, it will register 400 to 500 different solids in the water. So there’s definitely a

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:22:11):

Disconnect. I’m confused. Where are you getting that data? Are you actually using water check or

Kelly McCann, MD (00:22:19):

I didn’t do the water check yet. No, that was what I wanted to talk about. But the little dissolved solids meter. Yeah, the little meter that you get with your, so it’s not very sophisticated, right? But it does give you number. And when you use the zero water filter, which we can talk more about, but when you use that meter on unfiltered water, my water in Laguna Miguel is off the charts for hundred plus 500. It’s really contaminated with a lot of junk. I just haven’t done the water check yet to figure out what else is there.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:23:07):

But let’s talk about what you are accomplishing just by using, did you get the glass pitcher?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:23:14):

Yeah

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:23:15):

You buy this glass pitcher, which has a lid, and the lid has a filter that you screw in, and then that’s

Kelly McCann, MD (00:23:22):

A huge filter

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:23:24):

And it needs to be huge for all the work that it does. And then you pour that water through the filter to drink it, right? So what that filter is getting out is everything I’ve just mentioned, including hexavalent, chromium, the serious carcinogen and reproductive toxicant and immune toxic agent that is in 94% of the drinking water of the United States. So good for you. Now, my question to you is this is a filter media. It’s about this big, right, that you have to change often. Very often it can only filter so much gunk before it becomes clogged. And this is a big problem. The filter literally has filtered as much as it can, and you have to change it out. How long can you filter your water before you change out that changeable filter?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:24:23):

About two and a half weeks, depending on how many people in the household, how many people are using it, how much cooking we’re doing, how much coffee I drink. It’s a lot. It’s very, very frequent. And even though the glass filters are, I think they’re around $75, I’m sorry, the glass containers, which I love, I love having it in glass. It sits on the countertop. It’s probably 40 cups. It’s something like that. Those filters are super expensive, and we’re changing them a lot. So the Brita changing out the filter once a year, once every six months, and not cutting it.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:25:06):

And this is what I always tell patients, clients, doctors is let’s do the math. Let’s talk about an under or over the counter filter system, like pure effect or something like that, which is bigger and more expensive, but you only need to change those cartridges once a year, usually every six months if you live in an area with a lot of fluoride in the water. But if you do the math, and for instance, you have to change your filter twice a month, then 24 times 12, or excuse me, 24 times the price of the filter. That’s how much you’re ultimately spending to filter your water every year. And then you look at maybe a $500 filtration system that you have to change every year. It’s a math problem, and you just have to figure out which one is cheaper because they’ll both do the trick.

(00:26:10):

Zero water is very good at filtering out perfluorinates and lead and arsenic, and even fluoride. Fluoride is the hardest thing to filter out, honestly. But now that the court case was won for the opponents of water fluoridation, there is a precedent that will now encourage municipalities to stop fluoridating. And there already have been some cities that have decided to stop fluoridating water as a result of this recent court opinion. And so I think that’s important, right, is we don’t need fluoride in our drinking water. You can put it on your teeth. It may or may not have some effect, but it’s not good to drink. So that’s the thing, and that’s why it’s so important to figure out what’s in your water. So you’ve already got 17 pollutants or toxic chemicals in your drinking water that you’ve got to filter out, and that zero water takes out pretty much. I don’t know what they are, but I’m going to guess pretty much all of them. But you have to change your filter every couple of weeks. And this is, I think, the missing piece. Thank God Zero Water actually is honest about that. They’re one of the few water filtration companies that say, bottom line, you’ve got to change the filter. I don’t care who you are or where you live. You’ve got to change the filter how dirty the water is.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:27:50):

Yeah. So just to give you guys a math ballpark, if the filter itself is, I’m sorry, the container itself is $75 and I need 24 filters to make it through a year, that’s about $400 a give or take total. Total, yeah. Because you buy more filters, you get more discount. It looks like 16 plus 24 filters is going to cost you roughly $300. So add a few extra in if you drink more water or you may be in a place that is less polluted potentially. It’s interesting, my little zero water filter meter in Costa Mesa read about 200 and Laguna Niguel. It was more like 500, so obviously it’ll last longer. The cool thing about it too is you can tell almost immediately when the filter starts to go, because the water just tastes a little weird, tastes a little like, no, it’s going bad. Exactly.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:28:57):

When you drink filtered water, your taste buds become accustomed to the lack of those contaminants. And so you become hypersensitive in a way to those contaminants and you can taste them. Absolutely. Whenever I travel, I absolutely can taste the difference in the water. It’s really hard for me to drink unfiltered water. So that’s 400 bucks versus 725, 750 for a really high end over the counter or under the counter. So it’s definitely a financial benefit to use zero water. Okay, now I’m going to tell you something challenging and difficult, but I feel like it’s my job to tell you this.

(00:29:38):

Are you familiar with Consumer Lab? Do you know that group? So Consumer Lab is run by a physician, an md, and what they do is they used to test supplements for what was in them to see if there was sufficient levels of zinc in the zinc supplement, and then they moved on to food. And you remember that big story that came out about chocolate being contaminated with lead in cadmium. That was consumer lab that did that original study. And then other people, I can’t remember what else, EWG probably repeated that. So recently, consumer Lab has done an evaluation of water filtration systems. Zero water came out really on top in terms of its capacity to filter all but one contaminant. And that was microplastics. And unfortunately, they tested water prior to filtration with zero water and water after filtration with zero water, and there were more microplastics in the filtered water than there were in the tap water.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:30:43):

There’s plastic in the filter.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:30:46):

There’s plastic in the filter. So zero water of course, was not happy about this. I think there’s a lawsuit I, last I heard or read about the lawsuit. Consumer lab was standing by their FDA level analysis of the microplastics. And so what we have told people to do is we’re just transparent about it and we’re like, well, there are other pour through pictures that do get microplastics out of water. So if you’re concerned about microplastics, it might be good to do an extra level of filtration.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:19):

What are the pictures that are good for microplastics?

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:31:23):

I knew you were going to ask me that question. Great. It’s not on the tip of my tongue. So let’s talk more and I’ll look.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:32):

Okay. We’ll see if it perles in from the quantum back into your brain.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:31:38):

Yeah. Can’t hold everything in my head. I try to.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:31:45):

So how about, let’s talk a little bit more about, I think we skirted over the other ways to test your water. There’s a couple companies out there that I think do a decent job that people have access to. They don’t need a physician to order their test. One of them is water check, which is a good company. And then there’s one called TAP score.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:32:15):

Tap score is great too. I like them both.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:32:18):

Okay. Yeah. I’m going to do a head-to-head in Costa Mesa, and I will,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:32:25):

Oh, you mean you’re going to get your water check by both of them? That is,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:32:29):

Yeah. I’m going to do a head to head so I can compare each of ’em. That’s great. I was going to do it at home here, but we may move. So I’m going to stick with the water in my office since I’m not planning on leaving that space anytime soon.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:32:45):

In answer, Kelly to your previous question, clearly filtered pour through picture does have a NSF clearance. And I’ll explain that what that is in a minute for microplastics. So NSF is the National Sanitation Foundation, which certifies water filtration technology, and they have certified clearly filtered as a pour through picture. So did consumer lab looked at their pour through picture technology. The thing I don’t like about clearly filtered is they don’t have a glass picture. They only have plastic. And so you wonder

Kelly McCann, MD (00:33:28):

How that’s why I went with zero filter. We’ve had this conversation and I didn’t know what to do with that. I was like, okay, well clearly filter. It’s great, but it’s sitting in plastic.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:33:40):

Yep. So here’s the bottom line. I believe that hexavalent, chromium, arsenic and lead will kill you and make you sick long before microplastics ever will. If Dr. Fine was on this call, she might interrupt me, but this is what I think from the current available medical literature that we’ve got. So most important is to get those contaminants out of your water. The lead, we all know about lead arsenic, very common water contaminant, causative, not correlated with, but causative for very specific cancers including bladder, kidney, lung, and skin cancer. You do not want to be drinking that because it is toxic at low levels. And we test patients urine as you do Kelly for arsenic. And we are very often concerned about the levels of arsenic in our patient’s urine. That of course can come from contaminated food as well, but it mostly comes from contaminated tap water.

(00:34:46):

So I think the zero water filtration technology is probably the best for through pitcher on the market and the most affordable for sure. And then if you want to take that extra step and put it through clearly filtered, that appears to get the microplastics out, and then you can just pour it back into the glass pitcher of zero water and not, right. So how many busy families with little kids are going to take that extra step? Is that even reasonable? Zero water can fix this problem. And they’re probably trying to do it right now, and maybe they’ve already fixed it in which they should announce it.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:35:24):

Yeah. Maybe they could make a metal filter that is recyclable and we send it back when we’re done rather than throw it out. Because I always hate throwing out this plastic because

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:35:37):

Well, you might be heartened to know that one of the things I get in my inbox from that member association of professional water filtration technologists, whatever they are, they have found many new filtration technologies that are just coming online right now.

(00:35:58):

Some of them. Okay. You want to have your mind blown for a second.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:01):

Absolutely. I’m always blown

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:36:03):

With you, Lynn. One of them is a biofilter made out of the cellulose grown from kombucha.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:12):

Oh, wow.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:36:13):

Not I’m about to do a podcast on this because it’s so mind blowing. I love the mycelial world the good. Oh my gosh. So yes, there are actions.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:36:24):

You’re doing your own podcast on it.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:36:27):

Yep. We have a podcast that’s much more oriented towards the medical literature, but we always have this section in the beginning called First, The Good News because the rest of it is not good news. We have people like, oh, there’s hope before we completely depress ’em. And that is going to be in my next podcast. Yeah. In the EMEI review. So there’s so much good news in the water filtration front now, PFAS completely filterable, that’s going to be online any moment now because they figured out how to get all the PFAS out of drinking water. So that’s going to become a non-issue because the new federal regulation guidelines for how much you’re allowed to have is so small that you really can’t have any. And that was their intention. So that’s a good thing. It’s a piece of good news. I’m very heartened by the future of water filtration technology. It’s just not here yet.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:23):

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we talked about countertop. What are your favorite under the counter or whole house filtration systems?

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:37:37):

Alright, I’ll tell you my story. There’s a story backstory to this

Kelly McCann, MD (00:37:40):

Ok

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:37:41):

2015, the river that is the drinking water source for where I live became a global optic because it turned fluorescent orange as a result of a breach of a very toxic mine up at the headwaters. It was the Animus River in southwest Colorado that goes all the way into the Colorado River. And they were trying to fix some contamination issue, and they breached the mine and the contents of the mine just came pouring out. There was water in there and it turned the animus river fluorescent orange all the way to Colorado. And it’s such a beautiful river that everyone was just heartbroken. I worked with a advocacy group, an environmental advocacy group at the time, and we knew that the EPA would not be forthcoming about this. It was their bad, they were responsible. So we got an industrial hygienist to take samples from the Animus River in his own lab up in Denver. And what we found was significantly elevated levels of radium. Otherwise, we think about radon gas and come to learn that this is one of the major, if you go into that tap water database and you get most common contaminants in water, this is a very common contaminant. So we had two radioactive isotopes in our river water. One of our wonderful analytical chemists, Steve Ottersberg, who you may know,

(00:39:29):

Brilliant man. His wife is

Kelly McCann, MD (00:39:31):

Nasha Winter’s husband,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:39:32):

Nasha Winter’s husband. She’s a brilliant functional oncologist. He did the homework. He looked at all the filtration technologies and he found a scientist whose former career before he started making water filters, was working for the nuclear industry to create media that would take radioactive isotopes out of the water that comes spewing out of nuclear plants, right? Because there’s cooling ponds and you’ve got to filter that water before it goes into the cooling pond. So I talked to Steve and he said, I believe this guy is the real mail deal. So then I talked to him and he indeed had figured out new media for filtration and reverse osmosis systems. We all have heard of those, right? They’re really good filtration media, but they do get gunked up over time, and that’s what a lot of the filtration media for the water filters we buy that are under the counter or over the counter have in them. But he had created a new media, Igor Malesky is his name. He’s a PhD scientist, and he makes this filter called Pure Effect. And his website looks like it was made in the seventies. Yeah,

Kelly McCann, MD (00:40:49):

It’s a website. He needs a little website help design,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:40:53):

But he’s such a scientist that he says, I put all of my research money into improving my filtration technologies like Igor, you get at least get help with your web design. But anyway, I have been continuing to talk with him about his technology and he does not have pour through pictures. He just has under the counter and over the counter and shower filtration units. Now, there are a lot of shower filtration units. You just screw into your shower filter. But shower filtration we haven’t talked about yet. It’s very important because most people take hot showers and the heat of the water increases the amount of disinfection byproducts that actually come out as steam. And what happens to that steam? It gets inhaled in a hot shower. And the EPA has actually admitted that this is one of the more potent exposure sources for the carcinogens, disinfection byproduct carcinogens that come out of drinking water, showering water, and bathing water.

(00:42:01):

So I think I’ve been using that filtration system for since 2015 and so far so good. And I have done pre and post filtration testing. Now, I will say that the toughest part about using water filtration is knowing when to change the cartridges. You don’t have a little flag that pops up out of the filtration system that’s as dirty because the water will keep coming out. Now it will change taste, but that’s not the best way to do that. So he’s done all this research looking at how long the cartridges last and what he’s found out, this is a mindblower for me, is that it depends on how much fluoride is in the system because the fluoride molecule will gunk up the filter media faster. And so what he’s done is he actually works with people individually to try and figure out, I dunno how he does this because my water, thank God doesn’t have fluoride in it, but I’m sure yours does,

(00:43:11):

Is to figure out how many he has a special cartridge for fluoride. How many fluoride cartridges do you need? And he has found, and he encourages people, test your water before you put the filter on, test your water after you put the filter on, see what the difference is. And he has encouraged people to get in who live in an area where we could go talk about fluoride forever, but it’s not controlled. There’s no control. They put it in the municipal treatment plant, send it out, and depending on how far away you are from the original source is how much fluoride is in your water. So there’s this huge spectrum of how much, but what he’s found is that some people actually need two fluoride filtration cartridges in their system and his system is expandable. So you can just stick an extra cartridge in. I have changed my cartridges by myself.

(00:44:06):

I’ve actually put the filter in. It’s not that hard. So if you’re concerned like you’re going to have to pay a plumber $250 to put the system in, if you know how to use a drill and make holes in the wood in the bottom of underneath your sink, you can do that. If you get an over the counter system, you don’t have to do any of that because you don’t need to screw in the filtration system. It just takes up a lot of room. It’s big. It takes up a lot of room on your counter, but you don’t have to put it under your counter. So I think he is one of the scientists that I trust to make this technology, but there are many systems out there. I got it because I was concerned. I live in the Rocky Mountains of the United States, and we have a lot of radioactive elements, uranium and radon gas.

(00:45:01):

We have a lot of radon gas in our water. And radium 226 I think is the isotope, and 228 are the two radioactive isotopes. And so I was like, I don’t want to drink radioactive isotopes in my water because for sure those are carcinogens and cause birth defects and they’re reproductive. And so I thought if we can get the radioactive isotopes out and all the heavy metals and the pesticides, I’m happy. So clearly he can do that. So back to the NSF. So the National Sanitation Foundation, which they don’t call themselves that anymore. They’re not just about sanitation, it’s NSF. They are, I learned in my postgraduate education in environmental medicine, they are a really important resource because they list all the technologies that are identified both by NSF and by the manufacturer as able to remove specific contaminants. So let me see. I think I’ve got the actual, what happened to my cute little handout. There it is. I’ve got the actual website for NSF up here, and I can put it in the chat. And then you can go to, do I have it

Kelly McCann, MD (00:46:23):

NFS.org?

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:46:24):

Yep. nsf.org. So it’s a little weird to navigate, but what they do have, what NSF does have, and I know this from talking to Dr. Ky, is they actually, will they test the filtration technology for that specific contaminant before they approve it, and then they’ll list it. So you can actually look up, oh, what water filters get hexavalent chromium out of drinking water, and then boom, there they are. Now, I know from Dr. Malesky that it costs the company $40,000 per contaminant. So it’s only the big gigantic corporations that have a ton of contaminants that they check for. So just know that. But it is a legit system to understand what water filters have been actually approved for. I mean, they’re certified. Basically you trust NSF certification.

(00:47:32):

It’s a nonprofit, basically. It’s not a government agency. They really do have their own laboratory to check to make sure these are legit systems. Great. So you can also do that for a shower filter, and you will be excited to find out that there’s a company that is right now, I gave them a little money on Kickstarter, a bunch of young scientists that have just put together a filtration technology for a bath faucet, because right now there is, I don’t care how good those bath balls look, the little round things you hang, they don’t work. There’s not enough pressure going through that very cheap charcoal disc. It’s all it is, is activated charcoal to trap the contaminants. So this is actually a faucet. Your faucet just unscrews all bath faucets, just screw right on. So you screw it off. And it’s called bathhouse, HAUS. And I believe they’re going to launch any minute now because they raised enough money on Kickstarter to get their business going. And it’s just a bunch of young engineers that figured out how to do this. It’s so great. So it’s B-A-T-H-H-A-U-S bathtub faucet filter. And I’ll let you know as soon as it comes out because I pre-ordered one, they’re not going to be that expensive. And then you can safely give your kids a bath. I mean, this is a really important technology because otherwise

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:10):

What? Straight to Kickstarter? Yep.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:49:12):

Yes. Kickstarter. So look for it on Kickstarter. Perfect. I think we just got that listed in the chat. Wonderful.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:49:19):

Yay. Thanks, Michelle.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:49:21):

This is a solution that we have needed forever and ever and ever. And I cannot believe it took so long to get it, but these young engineers have figured it out and I’ve been following them, and I’m really excited because this is the one place for those of us that like to take baths where we have involuntary exposure. Remember dermal exposure to these toxicants is real hexavalent. Chromium is absorbed through the skin, so is lead, so is arsenic and the disinfection byproducts, they come up as steam in that hot water and we inhale them. So this is going to be a really important technology. So I think if you look at what are we in for now? So we’ve got $400 for drinking water, probably another 75 for a shower filter. Actually that’s pre covid price. I don’t know what the post covid price is. Probably

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:21):

125. And then it depends on how many showers you have. So if you have a couple showers,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:50:29):

And then I think this is going to be about 50. So this looks like about a $575 investment in drinking clean water. We can get into the ethics, the politics of all of that later. But I think this is our honest to god reality that we’re up against is that there is no drinking water that’s clean in the United States of America.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:50:55):

So what about stuff like Mountain Valley, spring water? Do they filter that

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:51:00):

At this point? Mountain Valley Spring water is as clean as their last hosted water test. So if you go onto their site, mountain Valley Spring Water, and you look at their last posted water test, it’s a very deep aquifer. I think it’s three aquifers down in the mountains of Arkansas. You’ll see that they have tested for every pesticide. I mean, they basically did kind of an extravagant water check test. And they’ve done this periodically. You can see the levels of detection and the lack of metals, pesticides, disinfection, byproducts, et cetera. Now, I don’t have a date on that water test, so I don’t know when it was done. There’s probably a date. I just don’t remember when the water test was done. So I think they are as reliable as the date of their last water test.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:51:58):

Okay,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:52:00):

Go

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:00):

Ahead. So we did an experiment with our little zero water filter meter, checked all the water, checked multiple different filtration systems. And of course, when the water was so bad, we had some sort of Brita esque filter that didn’t do anything. I had saana top countertop that I filtered didn’t really do. I mean it made it to like 400, from 500, who cares? The Mountain Valley spring water was probably 170-200 in terms of its solids. But my,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:52:44):

Hang on just a second. This is a total dissolved solids meter, right?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:49):

Correct.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:52:49):

PDS meter. So it’s going to measure magnesium.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:52:52):

Yes. All the minerals

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:52:54):

Chloride naturally occurring chloride, naturally occurring sodium, naturally occurring calcium, naturally occurring potassium phosphorus.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:02):

My take on it too was that those were just because there’s minerals in the water,

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:53:08):

Right? Right. And that’s my understanding. I’d probably have a very basic understanding of a total dissolved solids meter. But that’s my understanding is it’s measuring particulate matter.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:20):

Good

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:53:20):

And bad.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:53:21):

Good and bad. That’s what I thought too.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:53:23):

Yeah, and I think to their credit, zero water is doing their very best to say, Hey, if you see a big change in your TDS, that’s probably not good. And I agree with them. Baseline TDS, we can’t see what’s in there. We’d have to send it to water check or tap score to know exactly what’s in there. But it’s a TDS. I have a TDS meter. I use it all the time because I want to see baseline going, whoop, if it goes like this, I’m going to get really concerned that my water filter is not working anymore. Yeah, absolutely.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:01):

And they send it with every zero water filter that you purchase. So if you get one of the little tiny ones or you get one of the bigger ones, the glass one that we’ve been talking about, you’ll get one of those little meters. Carry it in your back pocket, use it everywhere

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:54:18):

Before you drink check. Yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh. Well, do we want to break and take questions about water before we go into air?

Kelly McCann, MD (00:54:31):

Maybe we should. Maybe we should. Let’s see. So, and some of these will probably be about a variety of different things, but is it true that the lower half of Manhattan post nine 11 for years had heavy metals that entered the bodies of everyone living and working on that lower half?

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:54:54):

I don’t have the information that would allow me to authoratively say yes or no. Probably. Probably there was a fair amount of mercury. Well, here’s what I do know. So a federal, there’s a national study every year. Dr. McCann knows all about this called the National Health and Nutrition Education Survey, where buses, a fleet of buses go all over the country and collect urine and blood from a whole bunch of individuals, like thousands of people every year. And then they ask them about their diet and they ask them where they live and they gather all the information that they can. New York, after 9-11 decided to do their very own NHANES study. So they sent buses out to New York all over the city to do the same thing. And what was interesting was they had collected some data pre nine 11 because they wanted to do their own nhanes. Anyway, the public health department did and post nine 11, and what they found was both blood and urine mercury levels went up significantly. I have no idea why. Honestly, I’m racking my brain trying to figure out where the mercury was coming from, but it was Oh, the

Kelly McCann, MD (00:56:12):

What? Oh, the vapor from all the maybe fluorescent

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:56:17):

Lighting. Yeah, maybe there were a bunch of fluorescent lights in the Twin towers. I don’t know. That’s a really good guess, honestly. But it was significant, statistically, significant enough that it wasn’t chance. It wasn’t just a fluke. And so my guess is that yes, that’s one example I can give that’s dramatically different. And there are probably many others. There are many other metals that are found naturally in building materials and pesticides contain metals. There were pesticides sprayed in the twin towers, so it would not be out of the realm of possibility. Let me put it that way.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:00):

It was all the corn syrup of the vending machine junk

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:57:08):

Knows. I published a study looking at high fructose corn syrup contamination with mercury and yeah, I’m sure

Kelly McCann, MD (00:57:15):

That contributed. Sorry, it was kind of an inside environmental medicine. Dr. Joke about the high fructose corn syrup. Mercury is contained in high fructose corn syrup. One of the many reasons we should not ingest high fructose corn syrup. I digress. What was the website that shows a chemical disaster every three days? And is

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:57:40):

There, oh, this is Dr. Fine’s department, but I can find it. That information is, or I can text her. Can I call a friend? Let me call a friend she standing by. She’s the one who did that research and presented it in our webinar. So it’s called this, you know what I can find it. It’s called the Center for Chemical Disasters, I think. And a volunteer, a bunch of scientists who actually have access to the data and can actually look. It’s a pretty easy to find website. So let’s see if we can find it.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:21):

Ask

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:58:21):

Me the next question.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:23):

Okay. Let’s see. So we’ve kind of talked about this, but we can just reiterate after this question. What filters exist for bathtub water and shower heads that do the most comprehensive and efficient filtering out of most things? I feel the sheer pressure of the water coming out of those would make it nearly impossible to filter more than chlorine and maybe a couple of other things. No. Yeah, so we didn’t actually say which shower filters would be best.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:58:50):

Okay. Hang on one second because I’m such a bad multitasker.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:54):

I know. It’s okay.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:58:56):

But you know what, multitasking is bad for your brain anyway.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:58:59):

Yes. And it doesn’t actually really happen. It’s all, we’re multitasking.

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:59:05):

We’re all fooling ourselves. Okay. There’s the website to track the chemical disasters.

Kelly McCann, MD (00:59:10):

Awesome. Preventchemicaldisasters.org

Lyn Patrick, ND (00:59:11):

Okay. So you can go to nsf.com and you can in, you can search for shower filters and you can see which ones are chemical specific or contaminants specific. But I think that pure effect is one I use. The other good one I checked out was this weird company called Pelican. I think they’re in NSF. I found my prior shower filter by going through the NSF site. Most shower filters are the same exact technology just duplicated by different companies. They’re just a reverse osmosis membrane. RO catches most contaminants. What we just talked about is that there is no bath faucet filter on the market at this current moment that will actually filter out the contaminants in bath water. It does not exist. And that’s why the bathhouse HAUS filter is so wonderful and hopeful and exciting is because they finally figured out a technology that sits inside of the faucet itself. So it’s pressurized. You cannot hang a little basket underneath your bath faucet and expect anything to happen. It just won’t happen. So this is a pressurized filter. You’ve got to pressurize the water going through the filtration system. That’s why you’ve got to hook up a drinking water filter to your pipe, your incoming water system. Right. It’s got to be pressurized.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:00:49):

Got it. Okay. I heard a health practitioner recently share that jet fuel is in half of the world’s food supply. Was this an exaggeration or is there a truth to this

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:01:00):

Jp? It’s called JP 70 or something. I don’t know the answer to that question because I haven’t seen that data. So I would hesitate to agree or disagree, but I know that there are many contaminants that are in the world food supply that we have no control over. And I would not go crazy thinking I have to stop eating food because we just talked about this. We have a doctor meeting every Wednesday night. Kelly’s been in it where we bring up cases and we look at how bad things are and we review patients

Kelly McCann, MD (01:01:37):

Get existential angst about the

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:01:39):

World. And yes, there are microplastics and there are performances in food. I think that if we can get the drinking water and the air exposures out that our body can handle most of the food exposures with the exception of the pesticides that are in and the fungicides and the herbicides that are in conventionally grown food. So I think the bottom line is we have to eat food. I’m one of those strange people who believes you can’t live on air or sunlight and that we have to eat food. And I just have seen many chemically sensitive and very sick people who have complex chronic illness, which is what you treat Dr. McCann, right? You treat that demographic. If they can filter their air and filter their water and eat clean food and get the kind of treatment that they need from you related to their biotoxin illness or their mold exposure, that they can become resilient.

(01:02:43):

And I just have to tell you, because I know you have these patients, my sickest, chemically sensitive patient was basically barely able to walk. He had been not a triathlete, but he’d been a long distance bicycler and he had gotten very ill and he basically could walk across the room and that was about it. And he went through a period of intervention, which absolutely involved clean air, clean water, and clean food. And this took about five years for him to get better. But now for fun, he is in process of climbing all the 14,000 foot mountains in Colorado. I think there’s like 27 of them. It’s a thing people do call the fourteener, right? He does that for fun because he has all the energy that a human being could ask for. So we know it’s possible and we want to be hopeful and happy. I mean, I’m 69 years old, right? I’m going to be 70 next year. I have all the energy I’ve ever wanted and sometimes a little too much. So I have to bike like a feed or kayak like a fiend or go hiking or do all this stuff. But I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen people get out of wheelchairs. So I believe right now it is enough for us. That’s why Kelly and I are talking about these things is because this is a crucial, fundamental foundational step for everybody to have clean air, clean water, and clean food, clean food. We don’t have time to talk about today, but definitely clean air. Do we have any water questions?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:04:21):

Yeah. Are there alternatives to water check company to test at home water for people living in suburban high rises, suburban homes and rural areas with well water?

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:04:32):

So tap water check has a specific test for well water

(01:04:39):

That will test for things that are different than urban water. So they’ve got two separate tests. You can look at the ingredients in both of them and you can pick them well. Water of course is high in arsenic, potentially, and methane because of contamination with natural gas, which happens, especially if you live near fracking. Then the city water looks more for chemicals, chemical contaminants that are more potentially contaminating city water tap score. If you compare water check to tap score, tap does not test for as many contaminants, but it’s cheaper. So you have to do what’s reasonable. You have to do what’s rational for you If you just don’t have a lot of money to spend, first of all, get a zero water glass pitcher

Kelly McCann, MD (01:05:32):

On the water, on the filtration rather

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:05:34):

Than get a zero water filtration system and change the filter accordingly. That’s going to get out most of the scary stuff we do sometimes. I don’t know about you, Kelly. Do you ask your patients to do a water check or tap score or,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:05:53):

I have recommended it. I haven’t been insisting on it mostly because I have yet to do it myself, and so I wanted to do it and be able to say, okay, here’s the benefits of doing this one, here’s the benefits of doing that one. But yes, it will become a much bigger conversation, especially after today. So one more question. How does water check’s findings compare to EWG typically for the zip code? Is there a big delta or does it reflect the same things at the same

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:06:26):

Level? It’s a really important question. Thank you, smart person who asked that question. It’s a really smart question. I have to talk just briefly about what’s legally required. So this is all federally. This is all a result of the Clean Water Act. So the Clean Water Act says municipalities have to test for these what are called regulated contaminants. So they’re legally, if you have over the amount of arsenic in your drinking water, your water provided or gets fined, right? So there are consequences. There are also what are called unregulated contaminants so that nobody gets fined, but there are contaminants of concern, like perfloronates. So you have to test for those as well, but you’re not going to get fined. That just changed. Actually, the law just changed last year. So now you will get fined. So you have to test for those. So there are two classes of contaminants, both are reported by the EPA.

(01:07:36):

Then there’s a whole bunch of chemicals that don’t fall into either one of those categories that will be checked for by water check, and pesticides is the operative word for a bunch of those chemicals. Pesticides are neurotoxicant, they’re endocrine disruptors. They’re carcinogens that are not regulated or unregulated. Like I said, there’s only a handful of the regulated. There’s only a handful of pesticides that they test for. That will come up in your tap water database search for your zip code. The other ones will be in the water check analysis. It’s a long list of 200 contaminants they’re looking for. So it depends, right? If you’re going to go ahead and get a water filtration technology that automatically gets out pesticides, it’s not that necessary. But I think for people who are ill, who absolutely want to get better, and we know the way to do that is to stop the toxicants from coming in right there.

(01:08:46):

We no ways to get the toxicants out. But before we do that, we have to stop them from coming into the body that the tap water, excuse me, water check or tap score are two ways to really make sure that there are no more toxicants coming in. And as Dr. Malesky says, check your tap water before you put the filter on. Check your tap water after you put the filter on. You’ve got to make sure that filter is working. You can’t assume, especially if you live in proximity to the water treatment plant that’s putting fluoride in your water, hopefully that will become a non-issue. Within this next year, enough people will go to their city council meetings and go to their public health department and say, it is clear from this recent court case that fluoride depresses or lowers the IQ of children. Why are you putting this in the water system? And then the municipality will have to admit that they actually get funding to do that.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:09:51):

Let’s make them dumb.

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:09:53):

It’s a money issue. And so there have already been municipalities that have stopped fluoridating as a result of citizens going in there and telling them about this recent court case. I think Children’s Health Defense has a whole interview with the lawyer who was responsible for that, in which he talks about the toxicology of fluoride. But that’s what I’m hoping will happen is citizen action will get fluoride out of the water as a result of this legal precedent that was just set.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:10:25):

Right.

(01:10:27):

Let’s see. Michael asked about, how do I know I need to change the filter? So with the zero water filter, the zero water starts tasting bad. So once it starts to taste bad, I know I got to change the filter. And it’s very obvious. You can also use the TDS meter that comes with the zero water filter that enables you to assess it should be zero. There should be nothing in there. It will start to increase before it probably changes the taste. Some like maybe it’s an eight or a 10 or 12, and then all of a sudden it tastes terrible and you got to change it. So that’s how I know I don’t know about assessing other water filters.

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:11:10):

Well, I would imagine the same is true for any water filter, right? Because it is very hard to make a semi-permeable membrane that will allow calcium ions and magnesium ions through like reverse osmosis takes everything out and allow the size of the molecule is what’s going to determine the filtration. And so arsenic and lead not that much bigger. I don’t have the periodic table memorized, but none of us do. That’s why there’s a periodic table. But you know what I mean? It is like a good filter is going to take all of those solids out, all of those dissolved solids out. So you’re absolutely going to see a change in the TDS from zero or two up to 40 or 50. Right. What does your TDS meter go up to? Do you know what’s at the high end?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:04):

Oh, like over 500.

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:12:06):

Okay. So yeah, you’ve got a span there.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:11):

Talk about distilled water. Do you recommend distilled water? I

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:12:17):

Do not. It is a unfortunate urban myth that distillation will take out some of the smaller pollutants, smaller molecular pollutants. Just the science isn’t there?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:12:37):

Oh gosh. There’s some amazing questions here, but I want to talk about air. Okay. Lot of time. Yeah. Maybe what we’ll do, if you’re okay with it, Lynn, we will grab the, Michelle grab the questions and we’ll add ’em to the newsletter. When we send out the replay, they’re fascinating questions that are a little more answered.

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:13:01):

I’m happy to help answer them. Okay. Absolutely. So you’ll get answers to your questions. Water filtration people. You want to talk about air filtration?

Kelly McCann, MD (01:13:11):

Let’s talk about air. Yes.

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:13:13):

Okay. So to my shock and horror, honestly, I had to go through all the data on airborne contaminants in the average home. And I had to look at the global picture, right? Guess what country? I know you’re going to get this right, but I want to ask you the question, Kelly. Anyway. Guess what country has the highest detectable indoor air levels? A bisphenol A,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:13:41):

I would probably guess USA or China,

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:13:46):

A hundred percent correct. The United States of America. So here’s the problem. We have these beautiful technologies. We have cell phones and computers. We’ve got garbage cans that the door opens on a sensor that not the door, the lid opens on a sensor. We have all this great Zumba, Roombas, whatever those little vacuums are that go around the floor, but they all come with a price. And that price is that the composition of the plastic degrades. So that’s what we don’t realize is that plastic is not this completely inert polymer that never falls apart. And in fact, most of our computers and our cell phones and all of that plastic are furnishings. Our draperies, our couches, they all off dust. And so what that means is that in the air, you’ll have these little particles floating around. We’ve all seen them, the dust bunnies that end up on our floors.

(01:14:47):

They’re not just little particles of dirt. They’re actually particles of what we call SVOC, semi volatile organic compounds. And what that means is that these little particles can exist both as gases and as solids, and they are pesticides and plastics mostly as well as per performance. We have a lot of pernet in our environment because they’re used in making, oh, our wonderful rain jackets from REI or Patagonia. In fact, Patagonia actually just decided they were going to stop using perfloronates, but they’re everywhere. So we have enough of these particulates in our environment that for babies who have higher exposure levels because they’re babies are like goats. I used to have a bunch of goats and goats. Really? The babies, they experience the environment through oral sensation. They eat everything. And babies are like that too, right? It’s normally, we all develop that way. We have to experience the world through our mouths.

(01:16:01):

So babies are much more likely, toddlers and infants who are crawling around are much more likely to have higher levels of bisphenol A and another plastic called phthalates than are adults. And this is why when you look in the NHANES database, Kelly, for blood levels, a bisphenols and blood levels of phthalates, sometimes if you look in the one year to 6-year-old category, which is the lowest category, you go, oh my God, why do they have higher levels in their blood and urine than an adult? That makes no sense, right? Is it because they were exposed in utero? No, it’s everything’s going in here. And then babies are crawling around on the floor where all the dust is on the floor. They’re chewing on cell phones, they’re chewing on iPads, they’re chewing on remotes. I see this. And so we have an indoor exposome that is both air and dust and the scientific data that we get from the way we understand indoor pollution is by doing dust measurement.

(01:17:15):

It is a direct surrogate, a direct correlate with how much is in the air because some of it’s condensing into dust. So the levels of indoor air, PFAS, the forever chemicals, phthalates, endocrine disruptors, extraordinaire that alter thyroid levels in us, we have an epidemic of thyroid disease. All of us doctors are like, oh my God, all my patients, their thyroid levels are off. They have Hashimoto’s, they’ve got graves. What’s going on? It’s very clear to me that the level of pesticides and phthalates, and even bisphenols, which are chemically eerily similar to thyroid hormone structures, are acting to alter our body’s ability to balance our endocrine systems. So that goes for reproductive hormones as well as thyroid hormones, as well as adrenal hormones. And so the levels in the indoor environment, the EPA has always said, and they’ve been telling the truth, indoor air is more polluted than outdoor air.

(01:18:22):

That is true. Unless you’ve got a wildfire out there and then your indoor air is probably cleaner, but in any other situation, you will have more exposure indoors. And so that’s why I’m kind of seeing the chat here. That is why indoor air filtration is no longer voluntary because of the level of these endocrine disrupting chemicals that are very palpable and measurable, quantifiable in our indoor air and are actually more voluminous. They’re in our indoor air at higher levels than they are in our outdoor air because of, I’m sitting next to my printer scanner, right? Oh, made out of plastic. They don’t make metal printer scanners. They only make plastic ones. I checked, and I know how much that off dusts, they don’t off gas, they off dusts. But some of those dust particles are small enough that they float around and we literally inhale and ingest them.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:30):

The ink, when it puts the ink on there, there’s solvents too that are being

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:19:36):

Airborne as a gas. Yeah. Yeah. So go ahead.

Kelly McCann, MD (01:19:42):

No. So what are your thoughts? What can we do about our air? How do we filter?

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:19:51):

I have very, very specific thoughts, and I’ll share them. My first specific thought is about Corsi Rosenthal filters. I don’t know if you guys know about these, but I had a conversation with a mold doctor who said they were perfectly fine and no big problem and that,

Kelly McCann, MD (01:20:08):

Can you say that again or spell that?

Lyn Patrick, ND (01:20:12):