Written by Christopher Kelly
Aug. 3, 2016
Fabian.Popa.on.2016-07-26.at.07
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. And today I am joined by Fabian Popa.
Hi, Fabian!
Fabian: Hi Chris. It’s great to be here.
Christopher: Thank you for coming on. I am super excited to talk to you. I think you know more about diet lifestyle and functional medicine than a lot of people practicing it too. So I’m really, really interested to pick your brains and try to extract as much information as I possibly can.
For those of you listening, Fabian is someone that I’ve been working with. What’s the right description here? One among consulting where you’ve shown me some lab results and I’ve helped you with the interpretation, but the reason I’m hesitating is because it’s really not clear to me who is the coach and who is the client. It’s very much a mutual relationship and really what you’re getting from me is my experience in having works with so many other people and seen what those people have gotten the best results doing. But before we get into the details, Fabian, could you tell me a bit about what you do for living professionally now?
Fabian: Sure. First of all that’s high praise and I got into this stuff by necessity. It just happens that I really liked it and I was really pissed out. I hadn’t learned about it sooner. Yeah, to answer your question I’m an engineer. I do mostly software engineering but I have worked on things that are closer to the hardware complete systems, some design. If it were up to me, I would enjoy being a one man show for most things because I find it so fascinating but of course that doesn’t work. And working in a team is actually one of the biggest perks of being a professional.
Christopher: And do you mind telling us who you work for?
Fabian: Well, my dad has a company and I’ve always had relationship with them. They do bigger scale engineering and hydraulics and gas distribution and I was exposed to the technical lingo pretty early which came in handy later on. Then I went off to university and I interned at Google and held various jobs at the bigger and smaller tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Christopher: And then you’re at Ubuntu right now, is that correct?
Fabian: Not anymore but yeah I had a stay there.
Christopher: I wanted to mention that because it was my favorite flavor of Linux so for people listening that don’t know, I’m a computer scientist. I’ve been using Linux since 1997 and I feel Ubuntu really change the experience when I was first introduced to that telco in London. It made Linux like a normal operating system. You’d never know. You could give it to your grandma and she would never know she was using Linux, right? It was phenomenal. So yeah, I was quite excited by that.
Fabian: Yeah, absolutely. They make Linux usable. It’s a great place.
Christopher: Yeah. My website still runs Ubuntu Linux, even though usability is not your primary concern with the server type set up when you’re hosting a website. I like Ubuntu so much that’s why I use it for that purpose too. But I better get back on track here and ask you what life was like when it was at its worse and when was that?
Fabian: I may be somewhat of an exception because I can pinpoint exactly when things went south. So it wasn’t gradual -- I mean it was gradual but it came on after specific events. So it’s July 2016 now, so two and a half years ago in January 2014. I just got pneumonia. I remember coming back from work and feeling a sort of burning sensation in my chest and I just wrote it off for awhile. It got pretty bad with coughing and sleeping through meetings because I really have no business being at work. I should have been at home and sleeping and taking care of myself but somehow it never registered with me that that is something people do.
And I held out and didn’t want to get on antibiotics, but while not taking care of myself so of course inevitably I ended up on antibiotics after about ten days of coughing my lungs out and I went to the doctor at that point and the lady doctor, she listened to my lungs at the base of my lungs she heard something and told me, “Well, you have pneumonia. Take this antibiotic.” And that’s what I did.
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So I took a fluoroquinolone which I now know much about called Avelox which is a brand name by Bayer for this floximoxacin thing which is similar to Levo or Cipro in the states. And I took that for ten days, the pneumonia cleared up and I was a happy camper after that, but a month or so after that, things started going wrong in very mysterious ways and I did not know what to make of it. I’m not going to go for the list of symptoms because people who might have experience the same know that it’s pretty long list. And you just know that clearly something is up, and I didn’t know if it was a direct consequence of the antibiotic or the pneumonia or if the system was just resetting and recovering after having been exposed to a pretty strong infection.
I just stayed with it for maybe another month or two and then started that Doctors Circuit that people might be familiar with and I saw all those specialties that have any relevance and of course the specialist look at you and then pass you on to someone else. The GP did the same. So just I didn’t find any answers there except after they exhaust their expertise, the only thing that’s left is some gnarly diagnosis that is completely false but it’s just what they resort to. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that and so I sought expertise elsewhere.
I was born and grew up in Romania that’s where I was at that time. And when I kind of exhausted my options there, I travelled to Germany where I did my undergrad and just kind of moved and stayed here for a while and talked to some people here and it’s kind of the same thing to be honest.
There are way more resources here but the standards and practices are really the same so the kind of topics we talk about did not come up much or at all. But we did uncover some things during our investigations. I had the beginning of Hashimoto’s Disease. So somehow I had ended up with autoimmunity.
And right now, I have some pretty strong theories about that and the sequence of events but at that point, I was completely confused. I didn’t know what that meant and if it was an issue with the thyroid gland or with the immune system or with maybe something else. And infections hadn’t necessarily registered at that point but some of the things we uncovered were that essentially. That was the diagnosis. So starting with the first month and up to the eighth month, my digestion was really shot, I couldn’t form -- I mean sorry to get in to poo but we have to get into that at the some point.
Christopher: Yeah, of course.
Fabian: But yeah, I couldn’t afford a strong stool. So that certainly points it in that direction.
Christopher: Was that after the antibiotics? I’m just wondering about what everything was like in the run up to the pneumonia. Does this really just come out of the blue or had you have some symptoms?
Fabian: Yeah. The way I remember it, yeah weirdly I felt really strong before that. I was not on the best nutrition. I did not take care of myself very well, I didn’t rest very much, and wasn’t very circadian and all of the things that we now know are fundamental to health. It wasn’t the worst stat but I was definitely average or less so I just got through it. I was feeling healthy, I was going to the gym late at night and fitting in all kinds of activities in the span of a day.
So it was pretty busy, pretty crazy, my work was fulfilling but it also involved a lot of travel. There were some frustrations elsewhere. I was trying to make some things happen and they didn’t happen at that point but it’s not that important. It was just was, I suppose that was the main situation that even made room for something that’s pneumonia, and then once that hit unfortunately, I got prescribed this really broad spectrum antibiotic that has some documented toxicity on the mitochondria as well.
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I didn’t get any probiotics along with that and it’s just I was not aware of what proper health is, how you care for it and that’s too bad. But I’ve overcome that and we can talk about the later progression and now have a really new interest in this field.
Christopher: So tell me, you said that you didn’t want to get through all of the symptoms, but could you give us just some of the symptoms that you were experiencing just before you figured out that you had Hashimoto’s.
Fabian: The biggest signs that something was wrong were neurological so I had muscle twitching quite a bit. Some weakness, I was gaining weight, I had actually hit a weight that I hadn’t before and I had some tinnitus and just this digestive situation that I didn’t quite take seriously until a month or two in.
Christopher: Okay. And what do you think happened?
Fabian: Well, I think that the biggest indicator is still the digestion that was completely broken afterwards. We didn’t do much stool testing except later on but my biome is still is but at that point was completely broken and after the antibiotic of course I had a fungal overgrowth when we notice that, maybe half a year after taking the antibiotic, then I started taking Nystatin, did that for a month and then I got left with some sort of dysbiosis and treating that especially when you’re going to further along and it had a chance to set in is as it turns out really tricky. I’m quite convince that was the root of my issues and I still have autoimmunity, my thyroid peroxidase antibodies are still above range but through a lot of effort, we can talk about they have come down significantly.
Right, so I started going out and researching as anyone would do and thankfully we have the internet and it’s more of a blessing than a curse, but it does have some aspects of credibility of sources and just the difficulty of knowing what is worthwhile and what isn’t when you go out and just read stuff. Especially for people like me who don’t have a training in this kind of stuff.
So I went out and I learned about functional medicine which immediately sat really, really well with me because it makes so much sense. If you have a good nutrition and sleep and all of the other aspects that make good physiology, then so sleep exercise and being circadian, so kind of being active with the sun then you are strong and you have a good chance of not hitting any kind of chronic awfulness. And on the other hand, if those things aren’t exactly well, then bad things can happen.
I followed this path and I came to know about the bigger names in functional medicine that we’ve all heard now. I reached out and got in touch with some practitioners at first and we started doing some protocols for dysbiosis and the biggest throwback I think with anything health related or with any treatment is that it just takes a while. So you can’t exactly expect immediate results and you can’t do a million things at once because then it’s hard to tell which work or didn’t. And I just tried to do it step by step. We did a weeding protocol and got some probiotics. The first protocol included Biocidin which is a pretty well-known antimicrobial and that didn’t seem to do anything for me.
Maybe it shifted some minor things around but it wasn’t until maybe around two or three different kinds of antimicrobials together with better brands of probiotic that I had learned about like VSL#3 which come in higher doses that things started to change. So after about eight months of really poor digestion and of course absorption and of course all of the other things that cascade from that with a lack of nutrients, it’s really hard to regain health.
And only after eight months, the digestion returned and at the moment it’s perfect. It’s like the picture of health on Bristol -- on the Bristol Chart --
Christopher: Yeah, Bristol Chart 4.
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Fabian: Yeah. It’s a Bristol 4, yeah. But a lot of things happened in between then and now. So those were the initial steps towards getting back some stability. And then through the magic of podcast, I came to learn about some of the better testing like the organic acids and the comprehensive digestive stool test.
Christopher: Which is by Doctor’s Data although it seems to be offered through other labs.
Fabian: Yeah. There are some patents that kind of reappear in this world. There are typically places that provide certain things. So Doctor’s Data may provide a test or a certain manufacturer may make a nutritional supplement that they trademark or patents and then a bunch of other brands repackaged that and offered.
Christopher: So yeah it could be that actually, that’s a good put point that maybe Doctor’s Data just have the same machine or the same underlying provider and that’s being used by a number of different companies. But I noticed that you sent me some stool test results that look like the Doctor’s Data test but had somebody else’s name on the top of it which I thought was interesting. Do you think that organic acids and the comprehensive stool analysis, are those the most useful test that you did for uncovering the dysbiosis that you had?
Fabian: Yeah. No doubt about that. They’re the best metabolic test that I know of and I’d love to know about others if there are any better ones. But it’s really as a cascade so you might run some blood work and notice that things are broken there but I think it’s very plausible that that is due to some reasons further up in the cascade so some sort of nutritional deficiency or infections or environmental toxins or problems or stress or lack of sleep.
Christopher: And how did you cut through the interpretation of the stool testing in particular? So this is one area that I found difficult to get a concrete hold on. Our understanding of the microbiome I think is still in its infancy and Doctor’s Data for example, they have these three different colors, the top of the report – green yellow and red. That’s very subjective and there’s no references given or anything like that. So what Doctor’s Data describe as dysbiotic, somebody else might say is commensal or even favorable. How did you cut through that interpretation? Did you have some help from anyone in particular?
Fabian: Oh yeah, for sure. There are some things that I’ve noticed on my end but those are not very much compared to the insights that I got by talking with you and thankfully Dr. Grace Liu and with Dr. Tommy Wood and some people that I was fortunate enough to have some contact with. It’s not free. I mean it only figures that people have to make a living and I’d like to talk about the cost thing a bit later on but yeah, it is the experience. I think perhaps the most valuable commodity is having a big sample size of people whom you’ve worked with and saw their progression and their testing.
What I was able to contribute is just looking at some markers in the blood like haptoglobin. So this is a molecule that mops up broken hemoglobin and it gets consumed in that process so for me, one of the doctors I spoke to early on, had the insight to check for haptoglobin and the couple of other markers. Haptoglobin was low, still within range, but between that point and today I’ve run it a couple of more times and you can see a downward progression. So now it’s almost not existent.
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And then the question is, why is that thing being consumed? And looking at the stool testing, there are some hemolytic bacteria in there. So these are species of I think enterococcus and streptococcus that lies the hemoglobin so they break it up. And haptoglobin then has to fulfill its task of clearing that broken hemoglobin. So I don’t know enough about the detail of everything I’ve just said. But kind of a bigger picture, that kind of make sense.
Then there are some other implications, some other mechanisms that are plausible. Hemoglobin might get broken through mechanical damage. So if due to inflammation you have some broken capillaries then hemoglobin has to travel through those and then they might break those cells.
Christopher: Or you could have a high level of oxidative stress that could be oxidative stress and maybe the phospholipid membrane that surrounds the red blood cell donates and electrons were free radical and eventually that leads to structural changes in the membrane that leads to the cell breaking down.
Fabian: Yeah, sure.
Christopher: That’s a possibility too but that’s a really interesting marker that I’ve not even thought about running before – haptoglobin. So I have to look into that.
Fabian: Yeah there are some markers that standout and I think this may be a lesson worth passing on is if you ran a bunch of lab work and we kind of get into the cost issues as well so testing is really expensive. It’s not the cost, it’s not the fee of the health coach that is the biggest cost, it’s actually the testing. So I think that’s a really good point of optimization so it’s not worth running the same lab work over and over if you can predict that’s it’s going to be the same but some markers that may be proxies of the bigger picture, I think are worth running more frequent.
So for me because haptoglobin is something that I believe is tied to the overall picture of digestion and perhaps even to symptoms that I’m seeing, that’s something that I like to follow. And like haptoglobin for me, some markers are diamine oxidase, so that is the enzyme that breaks down histamine. And if you have bacterial issues that can be a cause of higher histamine in the body and higher histamine as a cause of the immune activation so it kind of follows that if you have low diamine oxidase, then you still have some of sort of dysbiosis with higher histamine.
So I mentioned haptoglobin, diamine oxidase, and for me another one is C3 complement. Early on, again someone had the insight of running C3 and C4 complements and these are as best I understand, consumables in a way for the immune system. So when there’s immune activation these things go down and the first time we ran them so pretty early on, both of them were below range. And that is something that you see in pretty awful autoimmune issues, like lupus.
Thankfully, C4 came back up into range later on. But C3 always kind of stayed low. And it has tracked my overall well being pretty well. So there were times when it was almost back into range and I felt at my best at that point. And what else? TNF alpha is another one for me that is slightly elevated.
Christopher: You’ve got expensive taste in blood chemistry. I’ve looked to all of these markers and I never really learned them properly because I never run them because they’re so expensive. But I’m really excited. So tell me what you know about Tina TNF alpha.
Fabian: It’s a cytokine so it can be elevated for various reasons and it has some uncertainties so I presumed that in my case it’s elevated because of again some microbiome dysbiosis. It also can be elevated due to cancer so hopefully that’s not the case but it’s only slightly high. It just agitates the immune system and that’s exactly the kind of situation that you want to deal with so that the immune system gets a chance to calm down. There are various types of cells that make up the immune system and because of all of these influences that are internal or external to the body they can just get out of whack, out of balance so it’s a lot of work but it’s very much worth it to see where the imbalance lies and to try to bring it back.
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Christopher: Was there any dietary interventions that you made that really moved the needle there with any of these fancy blood markers that you talked about?
Fabian: Right. So these blood markers came later. Of course we started with diet and that should be, I’m sure that’s what you tell people as well that that is the place that you start. And the best out there especially if you know that you have some sort of autoimmunity is the autoimmune protocol. It’s very well documented, it can be really limiting or extreme when you see it at first but you get used to it.
There are tons of recipes out there. This is a known elimination diet and you just take all stuff out that might be what they call a trigger that might agitate your immune and then when things kind of calm down, and if you have more severe autoimmune issues when you talk about flavors and stuff like that which I thankfully don’t have then I think that the first thing you’re looking for is to stop the flaring to kind of bring everything back down and then you can look at putting in some of the foods that you’ve taken out but some things are just universal delinquencies.
The word that comes to mind like gluten and casein and I think there’s enough evidence there that especially people who have metabolic issues, they should rely on that evidence and not incorporate those things back even if they taste good.
Christopher: I should make it clear that you discovered that AIP diet independently of me so you’re already eating AIP when we first spoke. Have you been able to successfully reintroduce any of the foods?
Fabian: Yeah. I’m eating some white potato and egg yolk, what else? White rice.
Christopher: Any nuts?
Fabian: Yeah. Nuts and seeds, sure.
Christopher: So you’re sort of sticking more towards paleo type diet at the moment. You’ve not reintroduced wheat and dairy for example or added sugar.
Fabian: No. Honestly, I don’t see the benefit of wheat and dairy or sugar even if everything was perfect. Those things don’t seem to contribute to making you feel stronger.
Christopher: Yeah, I would agree. So one of the things I always think about is what went wrong in the first place. As an engineer, you’re always thinking that we have a system that worked pretty well before and then something changed and then suddenly you’ve got pneumonia and something happens and maybe you could explain some of that by some of your decisions about when you went to the gym and perhaps your circadian rhythm wasn’t quite what it should be and maybe you’re working too hard and under a lot of stress and not sleeping as much you should.
You have to wonder whether there was anything that you were eating that was also contributing to the crash and when you reintroduce foods, I think you have to be mindful of not just going back to the setup that lead to that initial crash.
Fabian: For sure and it is really interesting how my thinking has evolved with regards to food. I wouldn’t have eaten parsley just like that before. I wouldn’t have seeing the point in eating parsley because it’s not exactly a great taste. I don’t think it’s extremely nutritious but before I mean it could have grown in my garden and I wouldn’t have cared but now because I associated with nutrition and fixing issues and strength, it’s a staple but you’ll get used to the taste as well. There are other things so this one with proxy markers because if you go out and get digestive testing and organic acids testing and blood testing and you kind of form a team of a couple of health coaches and you strike up a conversation, you tried to be efficient about things, it’s going to get expensive. It’s just the way it is. Unfortunately, health insurance is freaking useless in this case and you will have to kind of go from savings.
At the beginning you kind of shoot widely. You try to cover as much as possible and then when you find these things that are broken in the body, I think that’s like we talked about, that’s the things that you should continue following and because it’s so overwhelming and confusing to learn about the various protocols and some of the wilder crazier stuff like the Marshall Protocol where you become a vampire and you shun the lights because you don’t want any vitamin D.
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There are some things that look pretty crazy at the beginning. Maybe they have [0:30:15], I don’t know, I really don’t know. But before you go into the wilder stuff, I think that you should focus on fixing what you know is broken. So when hopefully a stool test comes back and it’s all green then, if you’re still feeling broken then maybe it’s time to look at other things but I really doubt focusing on the microbiome which is really hard to shift and other people have attested to this. I really enjoy Tim Ferriss’ podcast and work and he dealt with some of this stuff himself and it is really hard and I think there’s a reason for that because -- let me just finish my original idea.
So when you have this kind of metabolic tests that attest to metabolic function and essentially with other words the lack of chronic disease because I think that’s another term for metabolic dysfunction. So if your metabolism is looking good through organic acids and your microbiome and digestion is looking good through this kind of stool testing that’s Great Plains or Genova or Doctor's Data offer and then maybe you have your own kind of blood markers that you’re tracking. When that comes back and it’s green then I would really be surprised if people would still feel broken.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely that’s 100% been my experience as well. But at the same time, I know how difficult what you’ve just said is to achieve and if you keep doing something stupid then you’re going to keep finding problems on the testing and I would include too much exercise in that category of stupid things so I go out and thrash my gut everyday for 2, 3, 4 hours and not every day but a lot of days and I really don’t think that’s a good idea but I do it because I love it and I enjoy riding my bike. I think as long as I do that, I’m always going to find it hard to be completely in the green across the spectrum of tests that you just described.
Fabian: I’m not. So I don’t want to imply that I’ve reached that point. It’s definitely my goal but just a note on the shifting the microbiome, I’ve done three or four sequences of this kind of weeding and reseeding that Grace Liu talks about and I haven’t done one on her protocol. I’m going to try to do that but the reason I’m not seeing a big shift myself is because I’m not displacing the mucosal microbiome.
So if you don’t stop eating when you’re doing this kind of protocol treatment, then I don’t think you get a chance to displace the microbes that are embedded in the lining of the gut. So perhaps and this is what I’m going to try to do this time is to fast. I’m not sure exactly if that’s the best thing to do to kind of give the body a chance to shed the lining and give the antimicrobials a chance to get in there as well. Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s the best approach but it’s one idea that seems to make sense.
Christopher: And then tell me about the microbiota transplant. What prompted you to try that?
Fabian: Oh, yeah.
Christopher: Oh, yeah that one.
Fabian: Yeah, that one. That was one of the bigger interventions just conceptually because I went Teymount clinic and they are super great. They are so professional and so kind and the treatment itself is made up of ten implants that they control very, very, carefully. They have their donors that follow this kind of diet and lifestyle that you promote and that I follow.
They get these samples and then implant them into other people. It’s not just the diet and lifestyle, they also do from what I understand every kind of infectious testing on those donors and then they restrict the samples to a three-month window in between rounds of this really extensive infectious testing so that you know that the samples are kind of contained in between health and health for the donors. And then they take the samples, they prepare them and they implant them into patients and the procedure is a walk in the park. It’s really not even worth mentioning. It’s like nothing.
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You just have to get over the ick factor and I think we’d all do best to get over that because it’s a really, really great tool. I can say that my microbiome, you have my stool testing from before and after and I had some things in the red before and now that’s clear, the red kind of box is clear but it’s still not perfect so I still have to kind of work there. My reasoning for doing it was that there’s a study and we can link to it that was published in Nature where they looked a rodent microbiome over generations. Parents followed a low fiber diet I believe, I’m not sure if they gave them antibiotics but with successive generations of following a biome starving diet or destructing diet, they could recover the microbiome for these rodent subjects less and less with the successive generation.
So in my case, my mom has some immune issues herself and I’m just not sure what the case was with even all the generations and I just thought if this is true then it may apply to humans as well, we all know that. Rodent studies aren’t necessarily indicative or they don’t necessarily apply for humans but I didn’t want to wait. What they showed is that the earlier generations could have their microbiome recovered just by introducing fiber but the later generations who kind of inherited this lack of microbiome, even when introducing fiber there, those didn’t recover. So they had to do an FMT in order to see the things that were completely missing.
Christopher: I know the study you’re talking about actually. Justin Sonnenberg talked about it at the UCSF Paleo Health Symposium in San Francisco a few months ago. I should definitely link to that in the show notes. It is a really interesting study even if it is done in rodents. And did you notice anything subjective? Did you notice any change in your symptoms either positive or negative after the FMT?
Fabian: Yeah. Absolutely. There are some things that change quickly and those reacted so sometimes when I wake up, I feel that my fingers are swollen and that just came down and most days now, I mean it’s really rarely or at all that I feel my fingers are swollen anymore.
Christopher: I think the stool testing that you’ve done is a very blunt instrument and to truly know what’s changed through this intervention, you would need much more sophisticated technology. I’m not even convinced that that is available commercially yet. I’m sure the situation would be very, very different in five and ten years’ time.
Fabian: I can get behind that. I’d really like to see better testing and testing that is more affordable.
Christopher: I mean this is just a traditional stool culture that you’ve done. The comprehensive stool analysis is a culture. So they’ve actually tried to grow something in a growth medium in a lab, whereas many if not most of the microbes that obligate anaerobes, so you expose them to oxygen and it kills them. So you can’t possibly do that. You can’t culture them in the same way and so other types of testing is more helpful and that the 16S DNA testing, that that’s just in its infancy and I’m not sure that it’s 100% reliable at the moment. There was a recent study that was making the case for stool culturomics is still being the king of the commercially available stool testing. So it’s a rapidly evolving area I would say.
Fabian: It’s really fascinating. You can’t catch, like you said, obligate anaerobes with culture but then there’s DNA testing, then there’s microscopic analysis. If you want to get the complete picture of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa or parasites or something then yeah, you have to do the whole spectrum. I haven’t done much uBiome yet but I like to try that as well.
Christopher: Yeah uBiome test very interesting too. I think that’s rapidly evolving as well. I think they changed the algorithm without telling anyone and that could make it difficult to compare your current result with the previous one. I would like to see more transparency there. I don’t get enough technical information about how the test works or the changes that they’re making. So for those reasons I consider that you buy and test a toy at the moment but I’m sure that will change in the future too. So tell me about how all of this experience has led to your interest in biochemistry and how that might lead to a new education and maybe even a new career in the future? A big question.
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Fabian: Yeah. I thought about it. It’s shocking to me that these kind of longer running health concerns or just things not working very well can be traced back to a single course of antibiotics. So you take some medicine and then you get this thing called iatrogenic injury so the antibiotic fulfilled this purpose with pneumonia but then there was this really tough side effect of breaking a balance that was there before in the gut and from there, then you have maybe all of us have some sort of genetic predispositions that may or may not manifest. In my case, one of them just manifested or maybe several I don’t know, but you don’t want to put yourself in that situation and I think if I could leave people with something, it is this term of iatrogenic injury.
Sooner or later there is going to be some sort of collateral damage from medication from pharmaceuticals and then it’s important to see the difference between a pharmaceutical molecule and nutritional supplements or just building blocks that your body recognizes or manufactures itself or just knows what to deal with and you’re just kind of giving it the stuff that it needs to function because it might not get it otherwise or it might too stressed or just too busy doing other things.
I mean anyone who reads about functional medicine would I think get an appreciation for biochemistry because it is like a chemical factory, this body that we all kind of live in, and it makes such a big difference to your life to have this factory running smoothly and that is the per view of biochemistry so it is really fascinating and complicated in the hard field but the results are absolutely incredible. Things that the medical establishments who just kind of brush against nutrition and brush against biochemistry but don’t necessarily stay there very long from what I’ve seen in their curriculum.
That’s not necessarily how they approach things. It’s too bad that’s not exactly the address where you’re going to get your answers and they classify metabolic issues, a lot of them as -- what’s the word? Unfixable. They just give up on that because there’s nothing available at the moment that is available within their sphere of influence that they could give you. So I have really come to understand that for acute injury and maybe some other things, the medical establishment is the place to go but for anything that’s chronic, anything that’s metabolic, biochemistry will have more answers and you see a lot of biochemists who are very convinced about nutrition.
I think that’s says it all because it really works for this class of ailments and because in my circle of friends and family, these are the issues that would make the most difference fixing these kinds of chronic ailments that everyone gets at one point or another. Its sucks if you get them when you’re younger but it’s not like you’re not going to get older. So having a really strong understanding there, having tools there, evolving the field and having access to the latest developments is what is going to give us I think a really good quality of life.
Christopher: What have been the most useful tools for you? So we mentioned it briefly earlier but I think the internet is a double edge sword right? At some level it gives you access to all this incredible information but on another it’s hard to know which are the important things and I think there’s a lot of stuff out there which is factually correct but not particularly relevant. It’s not as important as some people think. First of all, which of the tools have you found most useful and then secondly, how do you find the signal and the noise?
Fabian: That’s the question.
Christopher: A $64,000 question, yeah.
Fabian: Podcasts have been really huge for me because at the very least, the people who are considerate and just cerebral and trustworthy on these topics tend to reveal themselves in this world of interviews and that’s how we got in touch and it is confusing to know nothing about nutrition and physiology and lifestyle and to start to listen to these people, yeah. It’s really a lot.
[0:45:17]
But I don’t know if everyone has the time or patience or desire to get, to gain some knowledge in these topics themselves. So maybe just looking for someone who seem to be aware of what they don’t know but seem to make really good points on what is pretty well established and factually correct, maybe get in touch with those people and have them you.
Christopher: I would say to anyone listening to this who’s an engineer or a scientist of any type or any type of practitioner that I think you would really enjoy the process of learning about biochemistry and figuring out what’s going on inside of your body, because it’s not unlike engineering. In some respects, I feel like I’m still just a problem solver, as a computer scientist or as a software engineer, I’ll be tucked away in some back office somewhere trying to fix things that used to work and now are broken. I was like kind of occupied most of my time.
In a way I’m still doing that only data that I’m looking at, my debug has changed, right? It’s now looking organic acids and stool tests rather than looking at the output of my debugger but really I’m still just problem solving and I think that any engineer wouldn’t enjoy the process and my secret weapon has been talk to Tommy Woods and I appreciate that not everybody can have him but having someone with a formal education and an extremely critical minds and eagerness to learn are two things which I think really sets him apart.
I think that has been instrumental to my understanding. I realize that’s cheating a little but you can interact with coaches and just get some information from them and that just primes the pump and then you go away and you do your own research. It’s a really good feeling, isn’t it? I mean there’s nothing more important that your health and at some point in your life, it’s going to be your number one concern. So I think it’s a good idea to have a really good appreciation of what creates health.
Fabian: Yeah. I completely agree and you’ll profit forever from this kind of knowledge.
Christopher: Of course, yeah. Nothing but good things have come into my life since I started learning in this way and spending my not just free time but work time too learning about what makes people feel good. And years ago, I used to spend time reading the news and worrying about politics and stuff like that that just had so little impact on my life and if anything, just made me feel worse and out of control whereas with this stuff, not only is it more certain, is it more helpful. It’s also something you can control as well which is for me I find that really, really awesome.
Fabian: Yeah. I sometimes think what courses would have made more sense to teach to young people during I don’t know, grade school or high school than some of the things that we had and I think, not this early, biochemistry in its full detail but actually we did have biochemistry a little bit in biology but it was never presented in a way as a manual to your body.
Christopher: That’s the thing. Education is back to front. You need to care before you want to look at the details, right? So in biochemistry, I mean I’m sure that if I learned that in school, I would’ve not been interested at all. But once you a have a specific problem that you’re trying to solve and that problem is inside of your body, then suddenly biochemistry becomes the most interesting thing in the whole world. I’m not really sure how to solve that problem with the existing education system. What are you going to do? Like make kids sick and then try and teach them what’s wrong. I don’t think that’s going work. The system is backwards and that somehow we need to create the interest before presenting the solution.
Fabian: Yeah, you said it. Just like with the parsley it doesn’t taste very interesting until you know that --
Christopher: There’s no compelling reason to eat this. Why should I? Well, Fabian, this has been fantastic and I really appreciate your choosing to come on and talk to us about this and you’ve given me several markers and rabbit holes that I will enjoy investigating in the coming few hours and days and weeks. Let me just check, you are feeling better than before aren’t you?
Fabian: Yes, of course.
Christopher: Excellent. That’s what I like to hear. Maybe I should have asked that question in the beginning. That’s wonderful. I’m so happy to hear that. I mean even if it helps just one person then it’s worth it. Everything is worth it. So that’s just phenomenal. I’m really delighted for you and I wish you all the best in the future and we should stay in touch and maybe get you back on again in the future and tell us what else you’ve learned.
Fabian: Yeah, likewise. Thank you. You’ve been very candid with your own evolution so I think that the least I can do is share what I’ve learned. I still haven’t fixed the problem so that is going to be my goal. Maybe next time we talk, I can report that there’s autoimmune no more.
Christopher: That would be awesome. I look forward to it. I have every confidence that that will be the case.
Fabian: Yeah. Let’s see.
Christopher: All right, thanks Fabian.
Fabian: All right. Thank you. Bye.
[0:50:15]
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