Written by Christopher Kelly
March 17, 2016
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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 Dr. William Shaw. Hi, William.
William: Hi. How are you today?
Christopher: I'm very well and I'm very excited and honored to have you on. I'm sure you're an incredibly busy guy and I can't believe that I've got this time to talk to you. So I'm very excited about that. For people that don't know, Dr. William Shaw, Ph.D. is a board certified clinical chemist and toxicologist. And before founding the Great Plains Laboratory, Dr. Shaw worked for the Center for Disease Control. He is a master of organic acids. How did you first become interested in organic acids testing?
William: Well, I mean, just very early on in my career, I just realized it was using mass spectrometry and testing urine samples would allow me in essence to find out virtually everything that might be wrong with a person metabolically and with the goal of being able to diagnose and treat every disease. I think I started out with a cocky attitude. I remember my first day at CDC was asking the personnel director if I would have to share the Nobel Prize money with CDC when I won it.
Christopher: And did you?
William: No, I haven't achieved that level. But you can see I was starting from -- I was very motivated right from the beginning. So really Great Plains represents really a lifelong effort to produce, say, the technology and the information along with that technology to be able to diagnose a very large number of diseases, not every disease. But I can say that it's rare that people do our testing and don't come back with some very significant information that helps our health. And sometimes it is the most important thing. We've had many cases where the person may have been sick for 20 years without any significant resolution and it just took our test to give the missing piece so that I could get the appropriate treatment.
Christopher: Right. No, I thought the same. The first time I did one of these tests, I was like, wow, why is this not the standard of care? Why is it being two years of going to the doctor before I've done this test? Maybe before I ask you that question why aren't the general practitioners running these tests, I'm sure you could do a better job than I could of explaining exactly what the organic acids test is?
William: Yeah. So, the organic acids are really the stuff of metabolism which is the -- you can think of metabolism as being the world currency and there are all these transactions and it will be like if you were talking about in economics studying pounds and dollars and pesos and by studying that you would get an idea of how world the economy works. And so in studying these metabolites it's a similar thing. By studying these metabolites, I can detect what's going on in the world of the individual body which is an extremely complex system. It's a very complex system and it's not only human.
And so that was one of my major contributions, was showing that the metabolites from the bacteria and other microorganisms in the intestinal tract could play a profound effect on human health. Beginning of my career, people had the attitude that these were kind of inert passengers in the human body. And what I found out is that absolutely is not the case. That it's an extremely important area in human metabolism.
So in essence really, there's not a human metabolism. There is a human microbiome combined metabolism is really what's going on. And that's what is measured in the Great Plains organic acids test as this complex ecosystem of man and microorganism. And my own contribution was finding that certain species of Clostridia bacteria were profoundly important not only for intestinal health but for the health of our brain and nervous system.
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So if you have the wrong microorganisms, in essence, your brain cannot function correctly. So virtually, all mental diseases I found a substantial number of cases in which the microorganism in the intestinal tract is why the person has a neurologic or psychiatric illness.
Christopher: And this is very exciting because once you do the test and you find out what's going on, there's things you can do to manipulate or change the result.
William: Absolutely. So, rather than having to go to a psychiatrist and try one drug after another, many of which that don't work, you can find out the precise microorganism that's causing the problem, treat it and have a cessation of your symptoms. It's very gratifying to see people who have been sick for ten, 20, 30 years without substantial improvement to get complete resolution of their health need within a very short period of time.
Christopher: It's so exciting. And then that kind of brings me back to my question I touched on earlier is, why is it that I go and see my general practitioner here on Scotts Valley Drive, which is where I live in California, why they're not just running -- It's so non-invasive, so easy to do this test. So, why do you think the general practitioners are not running them?
William: It requires a considerable amount of training because it is complex. And so one of the things we do is we offer training classes to physicians because we found out that if you don't know how to drive a car you wouldn't be very interested at all in getting a car unless you know how to drive. And so it's the same deal here in order to be able to utilize this you need the proper training and it's usually a one-day seminar as usually adequate to give you the basics and most people can do a pretty good job after they've got this one day of training.
The other thing is the insurance industry has become very tight-fisted. And so their attitude is we want to prohibit any new technology getting out because otherwise, we'll make less money. I mean, it's really that simple. So there's almost a continuous battle with insurance companies getting them to pay. And of course, many insurance companies don't pay but some do. And so we work with them. But if they don't then it's paying out of pocket. But what I tried to explain though is even if you have to pay out of pocket it's not that expensive considering the benefits that you get and in addition to that it is paid for by many insurance companies.
Christopher: Right. I mean, I think for many of my audience they will not be too concerned with the cost. I mean, certainly for me, as a mountain biker, I race at the elite level, and so performance is important to me. I just see it as part of the cost of doing business. I run these expensive German Schwalbe tires and they cost $100 each. I can rip you one of those.
William: So, it's the price of two tires. It's not so bad.
Christopher: Right, exactly. Exactly. And one could save my life and the other one probably not so much.
William: And so the big benefit of this test is it can test all the systems in your body. It can be testing -- we get insights into what is going on to every part of the body, the intestine, the liver, the brain, the pancreas, all, the muscles. All of these different things can be assessed because they're all making this contribution to metabolism. And so we can find out what's going on by looking at these small molecules that can be extremely accurately measured. Some people have referred to the mass spectrometry as the truth machine because compared to other technology it is just, it's vastly superior and there's very little chance of error.
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Christopher: Right. And we know mass spectrometry because I've just interviewed the analytical chemist Mark Newman who runs the Lab Precision Analytical. They have hormone test called the DUTCH that uses a similar technology to measure the sex hormones. So that's kind of along the same base. That's also urine as well. But I thought you were going to say -- so the doctors surely they do know much of the test because they've learned it all in biochemistry. And I wondered if your answer was going to be the doctors don't realize that it's a commercial reality. So they all learned about the Krebs Cycle and mitochondrial function in medication school.
William: They learn about it enough probably to pass that particular test and then almost instantly forget.
Christopher: Yeah, I've gone the other way around. I saw the test result first and I was like, so what does all this mean? And that's kind of what led me to the Khan Academy that you may or may not have heard of. Sal Khan is a wonderful teacher that much of the chemistry and biochemistry that's required to understand this test is on the Khan Academy. And then also Bryan Walsh is a naturopathic doctor from Maryland. And he has a course on biochemistry. And I wouldn't say that you'd be able to interpret an organic acids test after doing that training but certainly it's a helpful foundation for understanding some of the results.
William: Yes. What's kind of an interesting thing is at one of the seminars that we had to talk about the testing we had in individual whose last name was Krebs and just as a joke I was saying, "Oh, you must be related to the one, to the Krebs cycle that we all had to study." And he says, "Yes." In fact, that was his grandfather, was the one who had gotten the Nobel Prize for elucidating the Krebs cycle.
Christopher: That's amazing. I wonder what Krebs would think if he was to see an organic acids test now? Wouldn't that be amazing?
William: I think he would be impressed.
Christopher: I think so too. I wanted to talk to you about what was different about the Great Plains test. So this result that we have in front of us now -- I've done one of the tests just recently. It's actually the first Great Plains result that I've seen. We've been using the Genova Diagnostics test. I say we. I work with two medical doctors and then also a registered nurse, my wife, who is a food scientist. I've seen about at least 500 probably nearly 600 of the Genova tests, which is significantly smaller than the Great Plains test.
William: Yeah. So, that is one of the big benefits of the Great Plains test, is that it's much more comprehensive. It covers a lot more territory and I would say a big difference is just my professional experience starting at CDC but also being in charge of the laboratory at the Children's Hospital specializing in metabolic disease. And so in essence, I've had experience in virtually the entire field of medical biochemistry. And so I think you'll find the interpretations that Great Plains has are the best anywhere.
Christopher: Right. And, of course, that's half the value of the test, I think, is having the experience of someone like you that's done the research and understands the significance of what you're measuring. And then also the reference ranges, I think is super important as well. So I'm just kind of curious to know how you define the reference ranges?
William: Yeah. Well, the reference ranges are getting volunteers and sometimes we give away pretests in order for someone to volunteer or a financial incentive. And we get them of all ages and sexes and then based on that we put together the results. We put together a statistical analysis and we look at histograms and if there's extremes we throw the extremes out and then based the range on the vast majority of the individuals who are normal. So that's one of the things.
Some of the laboratories use values from their patients. We do not do that. We use only healthy individuals so that helps to distinguish individuals who have a health problem from those who are healthy. So I know that other laboratories have said in their literature that they based their values on the patients that were submitted to them.
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Christopher: Right. Okay. That's very good to know. That's the right answer I was looking for. Thank you. And then I also wondered about is it relevant or interesting that say on the Genova test, the names of the acids are different. So they give their conjugate base form so instead of lactic, you see lactate. Is that relevant in any way or is it just in naming things?
William: No, no, it's just a -- some people say tomatoes, some people say tomato. It's exactly the same thing.
Christopher: To me, I'm a computer programmer. My undergraduate degree is in computer science. To me, all these things, these fancy names, they're just variables. I'm actually quite glad that you chose such strange exotic sounding variable names because it makes it very easy to do research. You just take the name of that organic acid and you cut and paste that into Google and you just don't find any junk.
One of the problems with the internet today is you type in coconut oil, like who knows what you'll find. Good information, bad information. But nobody is writing a ton of rubbish about some of the organic acids. And so those unique variable names I find very valuable.
William: So it's very important to get the, to have the right name and so that is a very important aspect. So one of the big features that we have, we have by far the most comprehensive markers for the microbiome. And for those microorganisms that are causing disease and as you can see for some of these like the HPHPA, we have even figured out the biochemical pathway that these microorganisms interfere with in the human brain. So there's a big diagram of the catecholamine metabolism in the brain and showing the neuron and how these metabolites of certain Clostridia bacteria interfere in brain metabolism.
Christopher: Right. So, this is extremely interesting to me because it affects me personally. So I've done this urine test and you've run the test and you sent me the result. I will publish in the show notes if you want to come to the show notes for this episode. I will link to the PDF for my results so that people listening to this afterwards can see this. So marker number 16 HPHPA is a metabolite that's produced by certain Clostridia species. So, this is interesting.
William: Right. And those species are indicated, the exact species.
Christopher: Right, right. So, can you tell us a bit about this HPHPA and what it does to the neurotransmitters?
William: Yeah. So the big problem with this compound is that it is very similar to some of the neurotransmitters like dopamine and because of the similarity it interferes with the conversion of dopamine to norepinephrine. Dopamine and norepinephrine are two of the most important neurotransmitters in the brain and in most individuals they have about an equal amount of dopamine and epinephrine and norepinephrine metabolites.
But if they have, if there's high amounts of these Clostridia bacteria they inhibit the key enzymes. It actually inactivates the key enzyme that transforms dopamine to norepinephrine. And that's called dopamine beta-hydroxylase. So, it's completely inactivated when it results, when it reacts with these Clostridia bacteria so it doesn't function at all. It's like destroyed. And, of course, the body can make new enzymes but for the time being that ability to make neurotransmitter is lost as a result of interaction with the metabolite from the Clostridia.
Christopher: Okay. So, this is kind of exciting. Marker number 16 HPHPA is a metabolite that it's produced by this Clostridia species and mine is really quite high. So less than 102 is the expected result. Mine is 305. So, it's definitely elevated. And then what's really exciting is we can scroll down and look at markers number 33 and 34. So, 33 is a breakdown product of dopamine. And you can see mine is very elevated. So, lots and lots of activity with dopamine. So dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter.
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William: Right. And it's perfectly good for you at low. But when it reaches high levels, it begins to -- So, you're right at the verge. Even though yours is high, it's enough that it's probably only causing you minor symptoms at this point. But as it gets higher and higher, it can be very toxic to the brain. So we can actually -- when it gets too high, it can actually kill the neurons that are producing dopamine.
When that happens the person can develop Parkinson's disease. And we've seen that in the number of patients with Parkinson's disease. And if it gets extremely high, we've had patients that instead of 300 have values like 3,000, they may have severe autism or schizophrenia or other severe psychiatric diseases. But even small amounts, we found that even individuals who have values that are just above normal will frequently have gastrointestinal distress and discomfort.
Christopher: Right, right. And so dopamine in excess like this actually causes oxidative stress which is something that we've talked about on the podcast before.
William: Yes. The metabolite is called dopachrome and it's extremely oxidative material, and in Chile they've done very good research using cell cultures of neurons, finding that it kills all these growing nerve cells when the values get too high.
Christopher: And then so beyond dopamine -- so dopamine converts to epinephrine and norepinephrine or if you're British English like me we call these things adrenaline. We can actually measure the breakdown of those things too on the organic acids. So, number 34 -- I'm used to saying vanilmandelate but you call it vanelmandelic. So, it's the same thing but just a different--
Willian: Slightly different name, yeah.
Christopher: Slightly different name. And you can see that I have -- it's not terribly low but it's certainly beyond two standard deviations from the mean. So rather low to activity of epinephrine and norepinephrine. And can you tell me how would I experience the symptoms, do you think?
William: Low levels it's usually mainly GI distress. But as it builds up, it could be anxiety, could be a little bit of depression. It could be obsessive behavior. The people who have to count to a thousand continuously. And so the higher it gets the more unusual the behavior. And I take it that this is just because there needs to be a certain balance of dopamine neurotransmitters and norepinephrine. If that balance is out of whack, then there's going to be consequences.
But in addition to that, your peripheral nervous system that controls heartbeat, saliva, the breakdown of glycogen to form glucose, which is very important for an athlete, all of these things could be impaired as well. All of these things require norepinephrine as the neurotransmitters. And if high amounts of this Clostridia is there, the sympathetic nerves will have difficulty converting dopamine to norepinephrine.
And so all of these bodily functions like heart rate, digestive rate, conversion of glycogen to glucose, all of these things that are important to the athlete could be impaired as a result of not having, not being able to produce adequate amounts of norepinephrine to excite these peripheral nervous system, the one that runs down the side of your body next to your spinal cord.
Christopher: Right. And this to me as an athlete is just so exciting. When the gun goes off at the start of a race, I need to produce norepinephrine and that's going to cause vasoconstrictuion in the gut. It's going to cause vasodilation in the lungs. It's going to allow me what my brain thinks is running for my life but really I'm competing in a race. And so this organic acids test showed me an overgrowth of this particular species of Clostridia to prevent that from happening.
William: Right. It could even impair you and the higher these things are the greater the amount of impairment. But for an athlete who's very competitive, of course, this could be the difference between winning and losing.
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Christopher: Right, of course. It's just so exciting that you think what everyone else is doing, all those coaches and personal trainers out there, no offense to you, just telling people to go lift some weights or go ride your bike and, of course, those things work but this is just cheating. I mean, you could get result from this one thing that you'd never be able to get from more riding of your bike or lifting more weight. I think it's incredibly exciting.
William: That's right. As I stated, we've had -- I can't mention any names but we've had world class athletes going from somewhere near the top to the very top after testing with us.
Christopher: That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I know it. I see from my results that we're talking about 3% or 5% difference between me and the national champion. That's the difference between mid pack and the winning. You're really not looking for that much of advantage. So, of course, the question is what to do about these Clostridia species?
William: And so the good thing is it's very easy to treat you. Values like yours, just probiotics are usually adequate. Some high end probiotic with 50 to 100 billion beneficial lactobacilli will do the trick. And sometimes if the values are even higher, they may have to resort to use of certain specific antibiotics like Vancomycin or Metronidazole.
Christopher: Okay. You mentioned the lactobacillus. Is there any other probiotics that work or is that your preferred?
William: That's one of the most effective. And actually, the certain species of lactobacillus were actually patented for their ability to control Clostridia. The patents are off now so anybody can make these probiotics. But in the past, the particular species, so lactobacillus acidophilus GG also called lactobacillus rhamnosus has very good abilities to control Clostridia bacteria and actually received a US patent for that purpose.
Christopher: And then while we're here talking about Clostridia species, why don't you tell us about the cresol because I think that's very interesting too.
William: Yes, yes. So, the cresol has the same effect as the HPHPA on dopamine metabolism. But in addition it's extremely toxic and can lead to -- high enough values could even be fatal. So it's a very toxic molecule. A lot of people probably can detect it on the breath. So, if the person's girlfriend says, "Boy, your breath smells absolutely terrible," it could mean that you have this particular Clostridia bacteria. Because it's kind of like a foul smell, like skunk or something like that.
And so a lot of times people will bring that up to me and I'll tell, "Well, you need to get this test on," and they'll find they may have the what is called the Clostridia difficile that produces the cresol and it's very specific. So, one of the nice things is that it is a unique molecule only produced by the Clostridia difficile bacteria, which is a very toxic one. I mean, many people die each year because of the infection in the intestinal tract. But some people have it for years and years and have intestinal problems but don't realize that it's due to what is sometimes abbreviated as C. diff as just a slang word for Clostridia difficile.
And they can have severe psychiatric and neurologic problems as a result of it. One of the things, for example, we found is that Clostridia problem is common in individuals with anorexia nervosa. So, what I suspect is it's not that these people are hung up with losing weight. It's that food actually makes them sick because as they eat certain food the Clostridia bacteria proliferate producing toxic compounds that go to their brain and make them feel bad.
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So not eating is like a defense against the toxic byproducts of the Clostridia. But, of course, the whole problem can be resolved just by getting rid of this Clostridia bacteria then the person can get back to a normal diet and normal eating patterns.
Christopher: That's absolutely amazing. And we've not had this before. So I have tested on stool test for the toxins that are produced by C. diff but I've never had the ability on organic acids to say conclusively that the C. diff was present. And my understanding is that the C. diff may or may not be producing the toxins and so the stool testing, it could be problematic.
William: That's right. The stool testing is testing for a particular toxin that's a protein that can affect the intestinal tract but the stool test is not testing for the bacteria that produce the 4-cresol. And so there could sometimes be difference. You could be negative by a stool test but positive by the organic acid test because not all subtypes of Clostridia difficile produce the toxin that is the most common test on in throughout the United States. This is a very unique test that is really only available in this laboratory. But in some ways I think this is more important because this affects your intestine and your brain. The other test is just testing for the toxin that affects your digestive tract.
Christopher: Awesome. Now, this is so exciting. I am so excited about this test. So another thing I wanted to talk to you about especially because this is something I've had kind of an ongoing problem with really. Like every time I've done an organic acids test the D-arabinitol -- So, D-arabinitol is a metabolite that's produced by a pathogenic species of yeast called Candida. It's marker number seven on the Great Plains result and you call it arabinose, which I guess is much the same variable name, just a slightly different way of saying it.
William: No, it is a different molecule and the arabinose is produced by the breakdown of the intestinal, the sugars that are in the intestinal lining after attack by Candida.
Christopher: Oh, interesting.
William: So, it's a little bit different. It is a different molecule. It's very similar. There's a one hydrogen difference but it is different but it's been a very useful marker for a large number of people.
Christopher: Right, okay. So, what do you think is going on here for me then with an elevation of arabinose?
William: I would say the most likely thing is that there is some Candida and it can be easily treated with a variety of antifungals including natural antifungals like coconut oil or caprylic acid or many other things. Or it can be treated with very safe pharmaceuticals like statin.
Christopher: Okay. And then how would you -- what's normal? What's the normal sort of set of symptoms of people that have a yeast overgrowth like this?
William: Fatigue is one of the most common problems, so chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and for a lot of people it can be depression or anxiety as well.
Christopher: Okay.
William: Sugar craving is one of the most common easy symptoms that are associated with Candida.
Christopher: Right. I know I definitely do not have. So, in the past, I definitely had an unhealthy relationship with sugar. I was definitely a sugar monster. I've cured that problem by switching to a very high fat ketogenic diet. And that's been working really well for me. At one point, the D-arabinitol -- so, this is the first time I've done the Great Plains test but the D-arabinitol on the Genova test was definitely headed in the right direction. And now this looks like maybe I've taken the turn for the worse again.
I've done some research and it's true. I've heard this a rumor and there's definitely some evidence to support the idea that yeast or Candida can actually metabolize ketones as well as sugar. So maybe I've not found a solution in getting rid of the sugar. But have you heard anything about that? Do you know anything about ketones being fuel for yeast?
William: Okay. So are you on a high -- Are you on what is called a ketogenic diet?
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Christopher: Yes, exactly.
William: Okay. No, I don't think that that's going to fuel the yeast but your organic acid test does show you have, you do have high ketones. But one of the things it also shows is that you likely don't have, may not have enough carnitine in your sample because numbers 45 through 49, four of the five are elevated and this would be a sign that there is probably inadequate amount of carnitine to handle the extra fat that you're putting into the system. So, this would be another supplement that could very well help competitively, I would think.
Christopher: Yeah, I know, and it has done in the past. I stopped taking the carnitine and as soon as I saw this result it went back into the mix, of course. So for people that don't know, carnitine is this nutrient that shuttles fatty acids into the mitochondria. So you can almost think of it like a taxi that's carrying, shuttling passengers into where the fat is burned as fuels. So, you could have all of the fatty acids available you like but if you lack this shuttle then you can actually oxidize them. So, what's been measured here are these organic acids. And I believe -- maybe you can correct me here, Dr. Shaw, but this is the result of the fats being oxidized in some other organelle other than the mitochondria, so in the peroxisome.
William: Yes, that's absolutely correct. So, what happens if there's not enough carnitine to provide the shuttling that Christopher was talking about, then what will happen is these fatty acids will be burned instead will be metabolized and the cytoplasm with a much reduced energy yield. So, of course, as an athlete, you want to get the maximum yield for your food. So, without the additional carnitine, there's essentially a lot of the fuel is being wasted and not enough energy in the form of what is called ATP is being produced.
Christopher: And that's the name of the game. It's the name of the game if you're suffering from fibromyalgia and it's the name of the game if you're an athlete. Like everybody wants to produce more ATP.
William: Correct.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. So, that's super exciting. I'm very excited to find these problems because they're so fixable. But to get back to the yeast, I'm kind of -- I've got a lot of learning to do here because I'm only used to seeing one yeast marker on the Genova test and here it looks like you've got nine.
William: Right. And what we find is that the more severe the problems the greater the number of metabolites that will appear. Another interesting thing is that we found that there's a relationship between the Candida problem and the oxalic acid. Yeasts have the ability to break down isocitric acid to form metabolites that are converted to oxalates. So, it had been known for a long time that there was relationship between having Candida problems and having excessive oxalates but the exact mechanism wasn't known until -- Actually it was a discovery of mine last week, the mechanism by which that occurs.
Christopher: Oh, wow. And so you're going to be publishing any research then? I feel as if there's a lot of homework here that I should be doing reading about but I haven't done yet.
William: Yeah. So this will, of course, take time. When you have a new discovery, it's going to take probably a year or longer before you get something in print.
Christopher: Right, of course. And so I did measure high levels of oxalates on the urinary organic acid test. I've lost the marker. I'm fiercely scrolling up and down at the moment. I've lost.
William: Look for 21.
Christopher: Number 21. That's right. So maybe we should talk about the significance of this because I have found just on the basic urinalysis in the past, you get to LabCorp and get some blood drawn and then sometimes they do a urinalysis too. That has come back and they found some oxalic crystals.
William: Crystals?
Christopher: Right, yes. I mean, it's not a huge finding but it's maybe a clue.
William: Yeah. So, what this -- The oxaclic acid or sometimes called oxalate, they are interchangeable, those metabolites are probably one of the most common causes of a wide variety of chronic illnesses.
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And they've been found the most common thing is that they can clog up the urinary tract and make you have kidney stones. But in addition to that, they can form in all the tissues in the body. They've been found in the brain, in the blood brain barrier, in the eyes, in the thyroid gland, in the liver, in the muscles. So, they can cause problems to all the organs in the body.
And especially important was a recent finding that they can cause atherosclerosis. And my own thought is this may be even much more important than the cholesterol story. And with cholesterol, you have somebody find something that everybody else jumps on the bandwagon, the drug companies get on to see how they can make a buck. But they look, but they lose the focus on all the other things that could be causing a problem.
So they found that number of people who had no problem with kidney stones but when they died of heart disease they found these oxalates all throughout their arteries. And undoubtedly, the oxalates are what caused the damage to the arteries which then led to the cholesterol being deposited. So this may take you, it may be 50 years or more but if you want to quote me today, I think that it will be found that the oxalate problem will be probably much more important than the cholesterol problem as an issue in heart disease.
Christopher: Wow, this is really -- Is it just the sheer amount of the organic acid that's causing the problem or is there some other -- There must be some--
William: A big contributing factor is the Candida. The other thing is the amount of oxalates in the diet. The foods that I would -- absolutely, the foods that I've stopped eating completely, spinach and soy. The ones that I would consider to eat in moderation are nuts and berries. So, nuts and berries are very high in oxalates. But if you do eat those, you need to make sure you take calcium and magnesium with every meal. So calcium citrate and magnesium citrate are the best remedies. So, this would be about 300 milligrams of calcium citrate, 100 to 150 milligrams of magnesium citrate with each meal if you have a problem with these oxalates. And of course, many people do. They're prevalent in our diet.
And what we've just started doing the DNA testing in the last few months and included in that are the genes for oxalates and we found that people who have high oxalates frequently have polymorphisms so that their genes that get rid of oxalates are weak. And so that's probably a factor. We've seen a number of individuals who have the polymorphisms which are variations in the DNA that make them more susceptible to having problems with the oxalates.
Christopher: Well, I think that's something I should definitely investigate because I'm not really eating. An obvious thing to avoid is smoothies, right? So we talked about this briefly before we started this interview that it seems like a really bad idea to take a bunch of these things like berries and nuts and maybe some spinach and throw it into a blender so you can eat -- I mean, you could eat a whole bag of spinach no problem whatsoever. That would blend down to absolute nothing. And so you get like a highly concentrated form of some of these oxalates. But I'm not doing that. We do eat spinach. We eat a lot of leafy greens but I don't really eat many nuts. I don't eat any berries. So there's just something else going on here that I need to investigate.
William: Well, the Candida is one of the factors. There could be a genetic factor. But the calcium and magnesium citrate could be -- that could be a big one. And then also vitamin B6. If you don't have enough B6 your body produces high amounts of oxalate and actually yours is a little bit on the low side. So that's one of the supplements that you could increase to help to control the oxalate situation.
Christopher: It's interesting. B6 is certainly something I've had a problem with in the past. And I've taken it as a supplement. And I do continue to take it as just the Thorne, just a really good quality multivitamin. But that's interesting that I'm still on the low. And this low side even though.
[0:45:07]
William: So, for people that have high oxa, it's recommended they take about 100 milligrams a day of B6. And it's very safe. There was a very nice study that was done in Texas that showed that people -- This was a general practitioner who put half of his patients on B6, the other half nothing. And he did like a follow-up after a long period of time. The people taking B6 lived n average of eight years longer than the people who did not take 100 milligrams of B6 supplement.
Christopher: Where can I go? I feel like there's a manual for this that I've not read yet. Is there a book or any other resources?
William: I need to write it. I need to write it. These are separate studies. There's not, to my knowledge, a single reservoir of this kind of information. There really needs to be one written.
Christopher: I will look forward to that. And until then, I guess I'll just have to keep doing my homework one by one. Of course, all these things, they sing together in an orchestra. I mean, we've already doing it just picking on a few things. You kind of jump around and look at different markers to kind of narrow down a list of possibilities to a list or probabilities. And that's kind of the way that organic acids or any type of functional health testing works. I mean, they are obviously well-studied, each of these organic acids. They've been since at least the '60s, I'd say, wouldn't you?
William: I would say that what we're doing here is what Warren Buffett does for his investment company. He just is a person who accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge and then is using it to make the right decisions. So that's kind of what we're doing here. We amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge and can see the interactions between different biochemical systems.
Christopher: Absolutely. It's an art and it's a science and I'm incredibly excited about it. And if you're listening to this and you want to run one of these organic acids test, I'll put a link to order one for my website. So what happens is, you place an order and then we send you a test kid and then you just collect the sample of urine and then you send that into the lab and then the results come back electronically and then I'll get you back on the phone or Skype and we can talk about the results. Very exciting. There's so many different directions. There's so many -- how many? Is it 74 or 76 different markers on here?
William: It's 75 and, of course, we're always on the -- It will be expanding sometime in the near future. We have a lot of exciting new things that will be coming down the road. We always have new things in development that we hope will be out probably in three or four months.
Christopher: Interesting. Well, if there's anything you want to talk about, please do let me know. I'd love to get you back on and talk about those or just some of the interesting markers that we haven't touched on today. I just think it's so interesting.
William: So, one of the new big ones we're having is going to be a marker for the jet fuel toxicity. It's been found that a number of airline passengers as well as pilots and flight attendants have gotten very ill from exposure to jet fuel. So virtually, every modern jet, when bringing air to the plane, that air circulates through the jet engine and it's contaminated with some very toxic chemicals that we'll be measuring in the future on the organic acid test.
Christopher: Oh wow. I don't like the sound of that because it sounds like something you need to quit your job in order to fix.
William: That's probably true. Either that or only work on the Dreamliner. The Dreamliner airline has a separate air system, the only modern passenger jet that doesn't contaminate the air with the jet fuel.
Christopher: Oh, wow, that's amazing. I wonder if your analytical chemistry could end up changing a completely separate industry in the end.
William: It might indeed. Yeah, because there really wasn't a good test available. And so we're looking forward to having this. Maybe the airline industry may not be looking forward to it too much.
Christopher: Yeah, I bet. Well, Dr. Shaw, this has been amazing. Is there anything else that you'd like people to know about? Where can they found out more information about you and your work?
[0:50:02]
William: Well, we have, one of the big things we have is webinars. So, if you go to the home page, you'll see webinars but you'll also see archived webinars. So all of the webinars that we present are still available after the live presentation. And there's more than 100 of these and they're extremely informative and they're free. As a matter of fact, we saw that some people are making courses out of our webinars.
Christopher: Wow. That's great though. I mean, it's great for you, I think, ultimately. Yeah, it's great for us. The educational piece I think is really important.
William: So, you can get all this information on oxalates, on cholesterol. And one of our favorite topics is low cholesterol. Most people think cholesterol is only bad. But low cholesterol is equally as bad as high cholesterol. And there's some webinars about that. We have webinars on a wide range of health topics and we have especially in the fields of autism and on mental health. We have a number of very good webinars from Dr. Greenblatt who is an integrative psychiatrist who can talk about the integrative approach to treating mental illness.
Christopher: Excellent. Well, I've just finished a course on physiology that I enjoyed. I'm kind of looking for the next thing to immerse myself in. So, I will seek those out and I'll link to them in the show notes for this episode so that people can find them too.
William: Okay. And I'm sorry but I need to move on, Christopher.
Christopher: Yeah, no problem. Okay, thank you very much for your time, Dr. Shaw.
William: Thank you for the interview.
Christopher: Yeah, no, my pleasure, thank you.
William: Okay, good talking to you today.
Christopher: Cheers then. Bye.
William: Bye.
[0:52:04] End of Audio
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