Written by Christopher Kelly
Aug. 13, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly, and today I'm joined by my colleague and first full-time employee and a registered nurse, Amelia Luker. Hi, Amelia.
Amelia: Hi, Chris. How are you doing today?
Christopher: I'm good. I'm really good. I'm much happier now that I found a place to live.
Amelia: Yes.
Christopher: Yes. I guess, nobody would know that a month ago my landlord decided that he was going to sell my house and things had been upside down since then and I'd been traveling in the UK to see some friends and family, which has been fun.
Amelia: You were a homeless world traveler.
Christopher: Yeah. I have a huge appreciation for all the people that put up with us with a one-year-old baby over the last month in their couches and stuff. But you do quite quickly get to the point like, "You know what, I really would like my own kid." But, yeah, so sorry if I'd not been returning your emails quite as quickly as I normally would. That's the reason. But I'm so glad that I've got you, Amelia, as a full time employee now. I think that's a really exciting change. I'm really happy that you're on board. I think it's really exciting. What's it like transitioning? So you were doing full time as a nurse at a hospital and now you're doing more stay at home stuff. How has the transition been?
Amelia: It's been nice. Sometimes I find myself working until all hours when I shouldn't be working to mind my circadian rhythm. But I'm working on that. But I really enjoy it. I've finally been able to break out of the traditional model. And I still do some traditional nursing just because I do love the human interaction side of it. And so I probably will keep that just because I love touching and caring for people.
But this is my true passion. I'm so fortunate to have the opportunity to do that especially with a company like Nourish Balance Thrive and with the population that we work for. I just feel incredibly blessed. Thank you, Chris, and thank you to everybody who allows me to be a part of their life and help them through some of the most difficult things they'll probably work through. Yeah, I'm excited.
Christopher: That is cool. Yeah, desk jobs are great but there's definitely certain advantages to running your own business and just starting something new and creating something. That's what I wanted to talk about today. It occurred to me -- I bumped into some old friends that I haven't really been in touch with for a long time that'd been listening to the podcast. They've enjoyed the podcast and learned quite a lot from it but they still have absolutely no idea what it is that I do for a living.
That's a rather curious situation. I guess it's somewhat kind of selfish of me. Like that's what's going on here, is the podcast is about my education. It's like me bringing on experts and having them talk about some of the things they know and have seen and helping educate me. And I'm hoping that it's been helping other people out there too. It's interesting content. And I've had some pretty good feedback, so I'm hoping that it is.
But at the same time, it's not really what I do. Do you know what I mean? Like talking to Patrick Arnold about ketone, exogenous ketone supplements, it's not really the core of what I do for a living. I thought for this episode, it will be good to just bring it back to basics and talk about what it is that we actually do at Nourish Balance Thrive. If you're expecting an expert interview on some new weird novel molecule that might improve your athletic performance, then maybe you want to find another podcast this week. But for everyone else listening, I think it might be useful to talk about what it is that we do at Nourish Balance Thrive.
Amelia: Yeah. I always say that I'm continually learning. So I don't think I'm an actual expert in anything. If you're looking for the expert, we've got plenty of podcasts with those experts.
Christopher: Well, that's another thing I think has been interesting. I definitely do not consider myself to be an expert. I still consider myself to be a computer scientist, an enthusiast, someone who's been sick and has recovered. And I've now talked to probably over a thousand people honestly because we've run tests on about 400 people. I must have talked to -- I need to add up and got to look through the calendar. But there's lots of days where I talk to more than three people doing these 15-minute free consultations, which is still available, by the way. You can still go on to the front page of nourishbalancethrive.com and book a free consultation and either me or Amelia will talk to you for 15 minutes about what's going on for you. I find out a lot of stuff that way.
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I talk to people from all over the world. They're not just in the US. They're in Europe. They're in South America, a lot in Australia. I hear a lot of things. Definitely I do not consider myself to be an expert. I know that our programs work and we have been getting good results but at the same time I'm fully expecting a decent amount of what we're recommending now to turn out to be wrong. And when it does turn out to be wrong, I'm going to get in touch with everyone and say, "Hey, that thing I told you about sleep, it's probably wrong. I don't think you should do that."
I definitely do not consider myself to be an expert and I'm always looking for an opportunity to learn. I hope that's the right attitude. And if you think it's the wrong attitude, please do let me know and maybe I'll have another rethink.
Amelia: There's a few basic core constructs that you just can't be wrong on. Make sure you eat the right foods. Make sure you get enough sleep. Make sure you get enough rest and repair.
Christopher: Yeah, it's true.
Amelia: And then from there, the intricacies, yeah, maybe the addition of one extra supplement would have been beneficial. The thing is we will learn that when science makes that available. I think the fact that we're open to learning and open to expanding what we know, I think that's probably one of the biggest helps to our patient population that we can provide.
Christopher: Yes, definitely. The free consultations, I thought it would be good to talk about some of those today and the types of people that I talk to. Everybody is unique but in some ways everybody is the same. It's actually not difficult to classify the type of person that I talk to. Maybe everybody is an athlete even if they won't admit that they're an athlete. Some people think that just because they're not -- I'm a pro mountain bike rider. I have a UCI pro license. And people think that I'm super serious and that's how I earn my living. That's not really true. It's not really true.
I am very competitive and I do have a UCI license. I do race at the highest level. But I think at nearly 40 years old, my main concern is really having fun and sticking around for a long time rather than being the fastest guy at a local cyclocross race. Everybody is just a variant of that really that we talked to. I mean, we do have quite a lot of pro athletes and some have even competed in the Olympics. Most people are not like that and I care as much about most people as anyone else. I'm thinking people running half marathons and people doing the shorter distances of the triathlons and even people that just want to look good naked.
Like I don't know. I think they all have a lot of things in common. And they're all athletes compared to the general population, who are really quite sedentary. You walk down the street or walk through an airport is a really great example that I saw recently. People are really in a bad way and probably quite sedentary. Yeah, you are an athlete, is what my point here.
Amelia: You even think about the stay at home mom who runs around chasing her kids all morning then goes to the spin class in the afternoon, comes back and cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner and then in the evening does a yoga class and--
Christopher: That's quite a lot more activity that I do.
Amelia: Yeah.
Christopher: Here's what pro athletes do, is they go out and they do a couple of hours of training and then they sit on their bum on a couch, which I think is a lot easier than chasing kids around or, Ivy's age, she's just in everything and she weighs 25 pounds and Julie still has to carry her most of the time. And so she's walking around with this 25-pound thing on her hip all the time. That's a lot of work. You're an athlete.
The free consultations, they're always really interesting and they're always extremely enlightening. And my goal in all of them and yours as well, I'm sure, Amelia, is to help the person. That's our first thing. I don't pick up the phone and immediately start trying to sell you a bunch of tests. That's not what happens. The first thing I try and do is help you. And the way I do that is to first listen to your story. Because that listening part, I think, is maybe the most important part of understanding what the right solution is going to be.
I think most people that I talked to already know about the Paleo diet. Some people had been eating a Paleo type diet for a lot longer than I have. Nearly everybody knows that they're sensitive to gluten and nearly everybody saw some improvement in their health when they stopped eating gluten.
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The reason they're calling me is because they still have some lingering issues that they wish to deal with. And once you've done that, say you switched to a Paleo diet and you didn't get what I would call the brochure experience, then now is a really good time to run some tests to figure out why you're not getting the full experience, why you're not getting all the results that you wanted to see. The next type of person I speak to has heard of the Paleo diet and probably know they're sensitive to gluten and they do their best to avoid it. And they describe themselves as low gluten. I'm not sure that low gluten works. What do you think, Amelia? Do you think you could be low on -- Like the 80-20 rule, does it apply to Paleo?
Amelia: The thing is, things like gluten, I just think there's absolutely not a place in the diet for. There are some gray area foods that especially after a time of healing, that there are places for reintroduction. But as a rule, I just don't think that -- Gluten and some other particular ingredients just have no place in the human diet.
Christopher: Yeah, I would agree. Let's just look at this at a different perspective. Let's say that you feel strongly. You'd like to debate me in the gluten sensitivity. Maybe you're not so sure that gluten sensitivity exists. Well, let's forget about that for a moment. Let's just organize all of the foods that you could eat and list them, sort them by nutritional density. All of the foods that I'm asking you to exclude in the grains are some of the most lowest in nutrients that there exist. I know from what limited studying of the biochemistry I've done is that a lot of these nutrients that are supposed to come from our food are quite difficult to get hold of and absorb.
As an athlete, you need more of them. And I see the results and I see this biochemistry going wrong because of nutrient deficiencies. And so it makes sense for me to point people, nudge, massage them in the direction of the most nutrient dense diet possible. And that diet, there's just no place for the grains in it. So I'm talking about -- I don't care if it's quinoa or pasta or whatever else. They're just things with not much in them apart from carbohydrates. I think that's the first thing to do.
If you're still doing 80-20 Paleo and you still have any kind of complaint, maybe your digestion is not great or maybe you're not sleeping as well as you'd like or maybe your training is not going as well as two years ago or maybe your sex drive is not what it once was, then yeah, try 100%. Do a Whole30. Whole30 is what I constantly direct people at because it's a well-defined version of Paleo. There's shopping lists. There's meal planners. There's all kinds of resources and a really good book that goes with the diet course, It Starts with Food.
I just point people at those resources. And more often than not, they get really good results by doing that and they learn something about their diet and foods that they're eating that they were probably sensitive to. And so those people get good results that way without actually spending any money. Anything they spent money on is the book and maybe slightly more on their shopping, maybe. Even that is questionable.
Amelia: One of things that I think is funny is that there's this new fad of removing grains from food. What's funny is that it's removing it from dog food. The thing is, if people would care enough about what they're putting in their own mouths at least as much as what they're putting in their pet's mouth, I think our society would be in a lot different place.
Christopher: Yeah, it's really curious piece of psychology that. I tell people, "Well, you're doing everything that I know in terms of your diet and lifestyle, so maybe now is a good time to do some testing." And you tell them how much the tests are. Say, the urine organic acids test, it costs $390. And they're like, "Oh my god, I couldn't spend that much of myself." But they would. If it was the dog and the dog had been hit by a car, they wouldn't hesitate to spend that much money on the dog. I don't want to seem like I'm an animal hater but that just seems like matters to me.
Amelia: And it's not about being an animal hater. People are animal lovers. I just wish that people would transpose that energy that they have for other living things--
Christopher: Into themselves.
Amelia: Unto themselves.
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Christopher: Yeah.
Amelia: Have enough love and respect for yourself to feel good because once you are feeling good, you have more power to help others feel better.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the ways that -- I've just been working on this health assessment questionnaire and it is now live and I will be telling people about it shortly. It's a way in which I can track progress. I already mentioned I'm a computer scientist. I'm definitely a data-driven guy. Up until this moment, before I had someone on full time like Amelia, I just didn't have time to start quantifying people's improvement. And I have now done that.
I have this questionnaire and the questions came from a huge data bank of questions developed by the NIH. I think it's pretty good. I really want a way to quantify that improvement. But one of the way qualitatively that I know that there is improvement is that people's humor improves. I notice that I prefer to do follow-up appointments than I do the free initial consultations. And it's because it's hard.
You talk to someone that's not feeling good and they got brain fog and they've just not slept the night before or maybe they've got diarrhea, they're not cracking jokes. I don't know. Some people hold that really well. They're real troopers. But in general, people are pretty grumpy. And then you change their diet and maybe do some tests and they take some supplements and do a follow-up appointment and they're smiling. You can't see them smiling because I'm talking to them on the phone or Skype but you can still sense it and they start cracking jokes. At that point, I'm like, "Yes, it's working. I know it's working because I can hear it in your voice. It's fantastic."
Okay. Back to the free consultations. There's a third type of person that's never heard of Paleo. Last week, I did a free consultation with someone and it was a woman in her 70s and her daughter was on the phone with her because the woman didn't speak very good English. I had to spell the word Paleo. At that point, I'm really, really excited for that woman. I think her main complaints were digestive and she also have a lot of anxiety.
And if you've never heard of the word Paleo, buckle yourself in. This is going to be good. I was really excited for her. I didn't even mention any test for her because that's the first thing to do. If you're listening to this and you still haven't tried the Paleo diet, forget about the lab tests. Forget about stool test. Forget about all of that stuff. Just do a Whole30 for a month and see what happens. And then if you don't get the best results that you hoped for then let's talk about the testing.
Amelia: Yeah. I think that's key. The thing is, once the diet and lifestyle pieces are in place whether it be making sure that diet is in place or even just making sure you're getting enough sleep, once those things are in place, it makes everything else so much easier. Then we get some tests on top of that, and then the treatment goes so much smoother. And you end up saving a lot of money because you're not treating conditions that are easily treated by having spinach twice a day.
Christopher: Even if you do the test with me, you've got to be prepared to make some diet and lifestyle changes because that's my strongest and most powerful tool. For example, say you did blood chemistry with me and the fasting insulin was 20 points, it was elevated. And your hemoglobin A1C was six. It was elevated. And your fasting blood glucose is 115. It's elevated. And your C-reactive protein is elevated. And your liver enzymes, ASD and ALT are elevated.
Well, if you tell me you're only getting five or six hours of sleep per night because you get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to do a run or a swim so that you can bike in the afternoon then, guess what, you're going to have to do something. That's not working for you and you're becoming insulin resistant. The outcome, the prognosis for you is not great. You're going to have to get that sleep somehow. Probably your athletic performance will improve if you get the sleep rather than if you do the morning workout.
You got to be prepared. Even if you are up for doing the testing, you've got to be prepared to make some diet and lifestyle changes. No doubt those are the hardest things to change. I can remember when I first started this and I talked with my practitioner and them saying, "Congratulations, you've done it." The autoimmune protocol. That's by far the hardest part that you will have to do. Doing these tests, peeing in a cup and sending it into the lab and then taking some supplements, anyone can do that. It's like falling off a log.
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It's super easy compared to overcoming the emotional attachment that you had to making your own bread. Yes, that's just the recap there. If you've never heard of Paleo, do it. The moment you're kind of 80-20 or you're low gluten or you still find yourself in Whole Foods eating the gluten free whatever they're selling now and you're still not where you want to be in terms of your health and performance, then go strict for a month. Do it as an experiment.
Challenge yourself. See if you can get through it. Put it in your TrainingPeaks calendar and execute it like you would your training plan. And at the end of the month, tell me about it. Did you see an improvement? And if you didn't, if you're still not getting the brochure experience, then let's get into the testing. And I guess in theory, you could come to me, never heard of any of this, and you just want to do it all right away. I mean, you could do that if you're up for it, if you've never heard of the Paleo diet and you wanted to do the test at the same time.
But I think it will be better to wait for a month and let things settle down a bit and then do the test. Okay, so let's get into the test. What the hell could we talk about with the test?
Amelia: One of the things -- Before we go on, I know that a lot of the population that I speak to especially women, they're concerned about going 100% strict on any diet because they have eating disorder tendencies. And by eliminating anything in their diet, they find that those thoughts and those compulsions kind of come rushing back. And we've been able to work with a lot of people with those similar experiences, but be able to do it in a clean diet.
So we don't necessarily take, we don't necessarily make anything restricted. We just close in the options a little bit. It's a very fine balance and it does require some follow up but I think that it's absolutely possible especially for a period of time until people realize how much they feel better. And then it no longer becomes a restriction. It's something that they feel better so it's something that they choose. So getting through that initial hurdle sometimes is difficult but that's what we're here for. We're here for that support. I just want to mention that before we go to testing.
Christopher: Yeah. I'm really glad you did, actually. It's a really important point. It's certainly one of my weaknesses, that I don't understand. There's a book that I think everybody should read. It's called Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin and I found out about this book through the Robb Wolf podcast. I read it while I was away in the UK. Maybe slightly before that. Anyway, fantastic book. And in it, Gretchen talks about different types of people. I'm an abstainer. So I do really well by discarding things out.
Amelia: See, and I'm the same way.
Christopher: Yeah. It's like, okay, so you have a problem with nuts. And I do. I have a problem with nuts. If there's nuts in the house, they're gone. I'll not eat a handful. I'll eat all of them. And so I do much better by not having those in the house at all. But not everybody is like me. And so my wife, Julie, is a really good example of a moderator. Julie is able to -- She will have five almonds and then with each almond that she eats, she wants an almond less and less.
She gets the fifth one and she's like, "Oh, I couldn't eat another thing." And it's absolutely infuriating to me. Especially the dry roasted and salted almonds are the worst. They're like crack cocaine to me. The rolled ones are like soaked and dehydrated are far less palatable and so I have an easier time with that. But my point here is not everybody is the same and I have a great deal of difficulty empathizing with certain people because they can't just cut things out.
And I think it's really useful for that reason to have Julie on board doing the food coaching, which she still does regularly, and you, Amelia, having kind of maybe sort of a better understanding of especially -- I hate to be sexist in this but it seems like some of the women are more sensitive and have greater emotional attachment to food and so need to be handled more carefully than I would probably default to doing.
Amelia: Well, I think we all have our strengths.
Christopher: Yeah, but you do touch on another important point, I think, and that there's no cause and effect here. There's vicious cycles and the system is complex. So it could be that your food cravings are being driven by the biochemistry. I mean, there's nothing totally unknown going on here.
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It's not like you're a bad person because you want to eat sugar. There's no spiritual component to this. At some point, it boils down to biology. And a lot of that of biology is on the organic acid test that we can measure. So maybe your sugar cravings are related to hormonal imbalance. Maybe it's a problem producing cellular mitochondrial energy in the citric acid cycle. Maybe that low energy state is what's driving your brain to seek out nutrient dense the most easily usable source of energy it can think of, which is sugar. That's possible.
Maybe when we go in and do some testing, that will fix some problems that reduce your cravings. And so we break this vicious cycle. That is possible. But it's still helpful to not eat sugar nevertheless.
Amelia: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
Christopher: Let's talk about the testing then. Let's say that you've tried my experiment. You've done the Whole30 and still you're finding that you can't sleep. Most people, especially athletes, they're okay about getting to sleep. That's not usually the problem. It's usually staying asleep. That's the thing that really sucks. That's the problem I hear most frequently. People are waking up at 2:00 or 3 o'clock in the morning and they're ready to go, ready for the next day. Of course, the following afternoon, they're crashing. They're so tired.
That, I would say, is one of the most common complaints. Why don't we just pick up on that for moment? What's the first thing you think of? Say I was an athlete and I just called you up and I told you about this? What would you be thinking? What would you suggest, Amelia?
Amelia: Well, there's a couple of things that I would think of. Obviously, we're going to look at your cortisol rhythm to make sure that your cortisol is higher in the morning and lower in the evening. And the problem is a lot of times with athletes you can see that rhythm become dysregulated. Now there's some things that we can do without supplementation that can help to kind of regulate that. But getting an idea of where the actual rhythm is so that we can support that hormonal system to where it needs support is going to be one of the key things that we take a look at.
And also blood sugar support. Understanding that sometimes in the afternoon when you have that crash especially after a meal, we need to start looking at your blood sugar and start seeing how you're managing your fuel sources. So there are a couple things that we could look at in addition to the testing.
Christopher: Absolutely. For those of you who don't know, we do this adrenal stress profile or sometimes called an ASI saliva test. And the way it works is you just spit into a vial four times during the course of one day and you send those samples into the lab. So there's no need to go to a lab and get blood drawn or anything like that. You just do the sample collection at home and then you send these samples in via FedEx and the results come back to me electronically. It shows how much cortisol you're producing at those four times during the day.
The reason this is relevant is because cortisol is a part of what defines our circadian rhythm and cortisol should be highest first thing in the morning and then lowest last thing at night. And cortisol is a catabolic hormone that mobilizes energy. And so if you got high cortisol at night -- I mean, this is a gross oversimplification but you could almost think of it as being high cortisol high energy sort of. It's a gross oversimplification. There's a point where it's probably wrong.
But needless to say, you got a high cortisol at night, that's not going to help with your sleep. And it's certainly something you should be looking at on the test result if that's your complaint. If you're not sleeping at night and you've got high cortisol, then there's a reason for that and you need to figure it out.
Amelia: And one of the biochemical things that happens with cortisol being high especially at night, the body won't be able to produce what it needs in order to produce melatonin. And so you're kind of fighting against yourself with that high cortisol. Not only do you have those points of energy because -- I kind of like it when you call it points of energy. Kind of makes it simple for my simple mind. When you have those high points of energy in the evening and your points of sleepiness are so low, you're really working against yourself. And there's some really simple and even lifestyle things that we can do. Throwing on a pair of amber-tinted sunglasses, just being able to cut the blue light off from your pituitary so that the body thinks it's time to rest.
[0:30:06]
So that's one of the things that we can do without even spending any money to support that sleep cycle at night. That is so important for rest and repair.
Christopher: Yeah. That's one of my most useful lifestyle hacks. It's probably the best way to describe that. And I talk to people about that all the time. It's funny because nobody -- It seems so simple to me now but you'd be amazed how many people don't know about this. Circadian rhythm is hardwired. You can't really do much about it. If you're a night shift worker, you're really up against it because our circadian rhythm is kind of hardwired.
And the thing that keeps it synchronized is our exposure to blue light. It's really helpful for sleep if you can get some bright light exposure first thing in the morning. When you start your day, do what I never do but would love to, and that's to go outside and walk. I'm looking at the window right now and it's a beautiful sunny morning here in California and I should be outside getting some bright light exposure.
Amelia: On my schedule, I schedule my outdoor time right as the sun comes up.
Christopher: That's what you need to do if you're not sleeping through the night. Having said that, I do sleep really well through the night now. Whatever I'm doing, it seems to be working. Know that you need to get some bright light exposure first thing in the morning. I've actually got another hack right in front of me. On my standing desk here, I've got these LED lighting strips. I will link to those in the show notes for this. They're from Amazon and they cost $20. They're just LED lights, like Christmas tree lights.
I've got this bright red color underneath my chin which might be helpful too. But anyway, yeah, bright light first thing in the morning, and then during the day, and then last thing at night, you do the opposite. You avoid it. Imagine you've gone camping. What happens? The sun goes down. It gets dark. And then maybe you would talk around the campfire for ten minutes and then you go to sleep. And that's the end of it. And you find yourself in bed by 9:00.
That's kind of what our bodies are evolved to handle. Our homes are full of iPads and TV screens and iPhones and WiFi and super bright. I've seen a lot of different houses now in America. I keep moving around quite a lot. Every house has got all these halogen spotlights everywhere. The first thing that happens when it gets dark is people start switching on at least 150 watt bulbs everywhere. So it's not surprising that we're doing this experiment. We're messing with our circadian rhythm and people are not sleeping as well as they should.
The thing that's funny is that people that know me, they think I'm a vampire. They're like, "Chris is really afraid of the light, isn't he? He loved this house. It's like really dark." I'm like, "No, it's not." It's not just light in general. It's like light at night. It's like that specific. Yeah, if you're not sleeping through the night, this light at night hack is something really important that you should know about and it's definitely worth a shot.
Amelia: Yes, definitely agreed.
Christopher: Okay. So the adrenal stress profile. The population of people that we work with, most of them are athletes, they nearly always come back with low cortisol. And so most people call this adrenal fatigue or adrenal insufficiency. I think of it as being one of the signs and symptoms of overtraining in a way. There's only so many times you can push that button and get a stress response, I think. But at the same time low cortisol for me is sort of a red flag. It's not like this is the source of all your problems. You just need to do this one saliva test, find out if I do have low cortisol or not and then take some supplements or do something to raise the cortisol and that's going to be the end of my problems.
Because it probably isn't. It probably is something else that's causing the cortisol to be low. And so that's what I encourage people to do, is to continue the investigation and to find out what else might be wrong. And so we can fix the low cortisol problem and your digestive issues and everything else.
Amelia: And also you're absolutely right. The hormonal backlash could be from something else. But especially in the athletic population, someone who like, as you said, keeps pressing that button and keeps running their body down, they're going to have troubles with their immunity. And so what ends up happening is they become a wonderful host for some of the really gross stuff that's in our environment.
[0:34:59]
And the thing is, you become a wonderful host when your immune system is dysregulated because you've been out doing two days for an entire year. So we find some pretty interesting bugs and pathogens in our stool test, things that normal people, normal healthy robust people wouldn't have in their stool. And then it becomes a vicious cycle. So here you have this susceptible host whose cortisols are already low. We just put them in a compromised immune position and now they have an infection that's compromising their immune system even more.
So then from there, what's going to be important is eliminating that infection. First of all, we're going to find out what it is because each separate bug is going to have a separate treatment. It's important to understand that especially in some longstanding infections, there are going to be some biofilm treatments that maybe necessary. Being with a practitioner that understands the ins and outs of the different bugs, I think, is super important. And so that's the stool test that we do.
Chris, I think you have such a great understanding of the test that really, I think, packs the biggest punch and that's the urine organics test. There's so many markers on that test that just once they get in line people will just feel so much better. And sometimes they can be the issue and sometimes they're the collateral damage from what's been happening in the gut or in the hormonal system. I think you have the best grasp on that test for sure. I can tell you that I learn something every day from you about that test.
Christopher: That's very generous of you. Yeah, it's true. You touched on one of my most frequently asked questions actually, is like how did this happen? What came first? How did I pick up this Entamoeba histolytica infection? Where was it? Was it when I was camping? What, giardia comes from water, doesn't it? I bet it was that time I went camping in Yosemite. I drank from that stream and that's when I got the giardia infection. That maybe true but the philosophical point that Amelia raises is that you were a really good host for that bug. As an athlete, as somebody with compromised immunity, you were just right. You were the perfect home for giardia and it just popped right on at that moment. And normal people with healthy uncompromised immune system--
Amelia: I hate to say the word normal because [0:38:17] [Indiscernible].
Christopher: Yeah, there's no such thing. It's a bad word to use. Yeah. I won't use or I'll resist the temptation to use normal then. I'll just say other people. Yeah, maybe they will get one bout of diarrhea and that will be the end of it. And for the immunocompromised athlete, maybe did a bike race, who had been doing some heavy training, the training at lowest immunity, immunity as a long-term building project, so it makes sense to defer that long term building project in the presence of stress which for you is training.
And then that makes you really good host for one of these bugs. Once you have one of these bugs, you then got this kind of vicious cycle going on where the bug represents another source of stress and so the vicious cycle continues. I think it's, as Amelia pointed out, really helpful to do the test and to find out if there is a bug there and then take some herbs or go see your doctor and get a prescription medicine and get that treated. And you can see some significant improvement.
I constantly talk to people that described getting rid of the cryptosporidium infection as being a life changing experience. Yeah, I strongly encourage you to do the test and get rid of those bugs should you find them to be present. But, yeah, the organic acid test. I love the organic test. The first time I saw the result, I was just enamored by it. I just looked at it and like, "Wow, look at all these numbers." I don't know what any of those names mean. Alpha-Ketoglutarate, what the hell is alpha-Ketoglutarate? And it just kind of -- It all started from there. That was a couple of years ago now. The organic acid test, if you're listening to this and you've done one, and you want to learn more about some of the research that's being done, then the thing to do is just to pick one of the organic acids.
[0:40:00]
So I'd say 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine is the name of the organic acid that measures oxidative stress. It's a breakdown product of the guanine of DNA. When you see high levels of 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine in your urine sample, something happens to the DNA that was contained within the cell. It's not good. Google that, 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine PubMed, and you'll find literally tens and thousands of scientific studies that had been done that use this organic acid to quantify the health outcomes in all types of people.
Yes, it's a super interesting test for that reason. You can just go through each one of the organic acids and look at it in a rather reductionist way like that. But that's not normally how I interpret the organics test. Normally I look at it and it just kind of this message kind of comes out of you. Like what type of person is this? And it's that message that, I think, is most important. The message becomes even richer. The story is even richer. But I also have the blood chemistry to look at, at the same time, the two tests side by side simultaneously.
At that point, you really start to see what's going on for a person. I'll give you an example that I was looking at last week. It's Steel's [Phonetic] example. I don't think he'll mind me using his name because I asked him. His results were just amazing to me. I just couldn't stop looking at them. They were so incredible. Steel's main complaint at this time is fatigue. He's really tired. And he'd done a lot of blood chemistry. He's in Australia and he'd done a bunch of blood chemistry.
And that's the nice thing about blood chemistry is it's ubiquitous. You can do it anywhere. Anywhere in the world you can get blood drawn. Even people in the third world countries can get blood drawn. And so what he knew was that he was kind of anemic on the blood chemistry. In fact, he was more than kind of anemic. He was pretty anemic. He was outside of the standard reference range. And on the organic acid test, I saw the citric acid cycle intermediates.
So the citric acid cycle, for people that don't know, the Krebs cycle or the TCA cycle, as it's sometimes known, is a series of biochemical processes you can think of being like a traffic circle. Or in the UK, we call them roundabouts. So there's these different steps in this roundabout and different amino acids and another intermediates enter into the traffic circle. And the whole purpose of this traffic circle is to generate electron donors.
The electron donors then go into something that's called the electron transport chain. So this is in the inner membrane of the mitochondria inside of the cell. And the electron donors, they donate their electrons to molecular oxygen. So this is just two molecules of oxygen stuck together. And guess where the oxygen is coming from? It's coming from the hemoglobin protein that's inside the red blood cell. So if you don't have sufficient oxygen to donate to be the recipient, to be oxidized, sorry, to be reduced by the electron donors from the electron transport chain, then the electron transport chain starts to back up. And when the electron transport chain starts to back up, the citric acid cycle starts to back up.
Amelia: Yeah, and I remember his markers. Every single one was backed up, wasn't it?
Christopher: Exactly. So every single on, every single marker in his TCA cycle was backed up. It was really, really high. So this is like there's been an accident on the roundabout.
Amelia: No, but there's been like six accidents at every single--
Christopher: Yeah. It's kind of gridlock now at this stage. But the original cause of the problem was insufficient deliverability of oxygen. There's just wasn't enough molecular oxygen being delivered for the electron transport chain to donate its electrons to. So the whole thing just backed up and become like gridlock. And so, he doesn't know this. He just knows he feels tired. That was his only complaint. He's like, so they're sometimes really, really disconnected, like fatigue? Is this something that everybody experiences?
There could be lots of different reasons. In this case, it was anemia and there's this beautiful example on his blood chemistry and organic acid test. But there's so many reasons why you could be tired. So for him, the specific reason why he was anemic was because he was deficient in iron. He had a history of -- Well, I won't go into his -- He had a history of gut problems that meant blood loss. And so he lost a lot of blood over the years. And as a result, he was very deficient in iron.
I know what this is like. I'd been through it personally. I ended up in the hospital having iron infused into me through an IV. And it wasn't that much fun. It was also very expensive and it's far easy to stop eating gluten, by the way, than it is to go down that route. But, yes, that's the solution I think, for him long term. And then also he had problems with producing red blood cells. So there's nutrients which are required to produce red blood cells like zinc, B12 and folate and B6.
[0:45:03]
And if those nutrients are missing, and we have some specific organic acids on the organic acid test that show whether or not those nutrients or hint of whether or not they're there in the required amounts, then you will not be able to produce red blood cells correctly. And if you can't produce red blood cells correctly, then you won't be able to deliver oxygen properly. And then so the electron transport chain will back up and then you get the fatigue. That's probably more information that you really wanted to know.
That just gives you an idea of how I can use the organic acid test to diagnose what is a rather general problem and the biochemistry might be very far removed from what you experience as symptoms. That's how the system, this way of thinking works. I think that's what makes me different from a doctor because when I was going through this personally, I'm pretty sure my doctor was not thinking like this. He was like, "Okay, you're tired. Well, you're an athlete. That's what happens to athletes. They get tired." "Okay, your sex drive has disappeared. Well, here's some supplemental testosterone. That might help. Here's some Viagra. That might help."
He was not thinking about electron transport chain. And, of course, I talked about cortisol and low cortisol. Normally, people talk about the HPA access and this is a part of the brain -- HPA stands for hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access. This is the part of the physiology. This is the brain and then this is the gland, the adrenal gland that's being told to produce this hormone. And that can become easily dysregulated by a number of things.
You have to remember, people talk about that stuff all the time, but where does cortisol even come from in the first place? Well, there's a cell somewhere in your body inside the adrenal gland that's producing this hormone. And that cell needs energy in order to produce this hormone in the first place. Still his cortisol wasn't horribly low. It was quite low. It was not as low as I've ever seen. But that absolutely could be a reason why his cortisol was low.
If the cells in his adrenal glands can't produce energy, they can't produce cortisol. And so this is a problem that we need to solve before -- It's not just as simple as taking some adaptogenic herbs to fix the low cortisol problem. You've really got to look into it deeper.
Amelia: Yeah. And I think that's exactly the point. Having these tests together really gives us a better clinical picture of what's going on. Because you could have just seen one test, just seen the hormone test, the adrenal test. And you could have gotten a pretty good idea of what's going on. But you wouldn't have known where it's coming from and what the root of the issue is. And so sometimes it's a stretch for a lot of people. But getting these tests together really gives the patient the best opportunity to get the best results.
Christopher: Absolutely. It's another point worth mentioning. I know these tests are expensive. Steel, in particular, because he was in Australia, he spent a fortune. And I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. He did tell me it cost him US $500 just in the shipping cost to send these samples into the lab in the US which is a massive amount of money, I know. But I am really confident that this guy, once he fixes his anemia, once we get to the bottom, once we straightened out his biochemistry, he's going to have a life changing experience.
Amelia: Absolutely.
Christopher: I'm not sure we could have done that with just one test. If all I have was the result of one test, I don't think I could do that. When I first looked in his results, I just wanted to climb down Skpe and kiss him for doing all the tests at once because it was just -- It's so annoying. Annoying is maybe not the right word. But when someone does just one test and you just have--
Amelia: It's frustrating that you want this person to feel better but we're limited by the information that we have.
Christopher: Right. So imagine this. I'll create another analogy for you. Imagine your car had a similar symptom. It just wouldn't go. You're pressing on the gas pedal and it's not just accelerating like it should. And so you took it into the garage and you said to the mechanic, "I want you to figure out what's wrong with my car, but you can only look at the engine check light. That's the only thing I can let you look at. That's it." The mechanic would just look at you like you're an idiot.
I know that the testing, the mechanic's time, cost a lot of money and these tests cost a lot of money but it's just the price of doing business. It's just what you got to do in order to find out what's wrong and so that you can get to the most efficient and fast solution possible. And that's the way that we work too, is we encourage people to do all of the tests at once and sure it's possible that Steel didn't really need to do that second stool test. With hindsight, I would admit that that's true.
[0:50:02]
He could have saved his money there. But really, looking at it from the start, like do you really care that at the end of it you may have wasted $400 on a stool test if the outcome is a life changing experience that allows you to sleep better or have better sex or train harder or spend more time with your daughter or be more productive at work? It's like $500 is -- I don't know. Even if was penniless and I'm not rich now, I still don't have health insurance, then I still, if I was sick, absolutely I would spend the money on these tests first in order to get super healthy so that I could then get out and get a job and be productive and earn more money.
Amelia: Yeah. Wasn't it Einstein that said a failure is still an answer? We get a stool test back and at least we know that that's not the issue that we're working with and we can concentrate our energy somewhere else.
Christopher: Yeah. It's a really good point. Anyway, I think I probably waffled on for long enough. But I'm hoping, and please do let me know. I really want to know what you're thinking. Have I answered that question: What the heck is it do you do at Nourish Balance Thrive? Just to recap, it's diet and lifestyle coaching, first and foremost. We get people to eat a Paleo diet. We get people to look at some other things they're doing in their lifestyle, like how much sleep they're getting and how much stress they're under and how much training they're doing.
And then once we've got all those things in place -- And I'm constantly asking people, "Did you do your Headspace? Are you managing stress?" I'm like a broken record in that respect. Once we get all those things straightened out, then we get into the testing and we look at the biochemistry and the physiology and we look for these infections and we look for these nutrient deficiencies and we look for these hormonal imbalances. And we fix those things. And then we get the result. That's what we do at Nourish Balance Thrive.
I'm hoping that's like -- It's still far too many words. It's still not an elevated pitch. But I'm hoping in this podcast I've answered some of the questions that people are asking me when I was traveling in the UK.
Amelia: You did a great job.
Christopher: Thank you. And thank you for being on. It's fantastic to have you here to keep me in line and to remind me of all these really important points. If you've got any questions, then send them to me. Maybe we'll do a question and answer show. If it's a more complicated question than I can answer then I've had so many of these interviews, expert interviews on the podcast now. I have this kind of Rolodex, if you like, of people I can ask if it's beyond the scope of my knowledge. In particular, Dr. Tommy Wood has been on the podcast several times. He's a genius. He's really great. And I can always ask him. Do let me know if you have any questions.
Amelia: If you do have question, I'm here to help because Chris is extremely busy. Chris does what he does and he does a wonderful job at what he does. And so I do answer a lot of Chris's questions and emails and things like that. Sometimes if you're sending something to Chris, you may get a reply from me. Just know that we do work very closely together. Even though I am a traditionally trained registered nurse, I am a functionally trained Kalish practitioner and Chris and I work very closely together. And if I do have any questions, Chris is always available to put me on the right path and answer my question.
Christopher: Yeah. And then sometimes it's Julie too as well, is worth mentioning.
Amelia: Absolutely. Yeah.
Christopher: Support@nourishbalancethrive.com is our main email address. From there, we have now a ticketing system. Every time somebody asks us a question, it opens a ticket. And then that ticket gets assigned to the right person. So if you've asked the question about the autoimmune protocol then it's probably going to be Julie that gets assigned that ticket. And if you've asked the question about alpha-Ketoglutarate or 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, then probably I'll get the question. Know that it's more efficient if you just email support@nourishbalancethrive.com and we can take it from there.
Amelia: Absolutely.
Christopher: Okay. Thanks a lot, Amelia. Bye.
Amelia: All right. Thanks, Chris. Have a wonderful day.
Christopher: Thank you. And you.
Amelia: Bye.
[0:54:15] End of Audio
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