Written by Christopher Kelly
Feb. 17, 2017
[00:00:00]
Christopher Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name’s Christopher Kelly and today I’m joined Dr. Tommy Wood.
Dr Tommy Wood: Hi.
Christopher: And that’s not a mistake, I said the word ‘doctor’ twice because Tommy’s got some exciting news. Tell us about your PhD defence, Tommy.
Tommy: Oh yes, so this was I guess a couple of weeks ago now. I went back to Norway for my official PhD defence and the way the system works in Norway kind of means that you submit your thesis and then a few months later you come back and you have your official defence, where you have opponents turn up and first I had to give a…they gave me a topic for a trial lecture which I had 2 weeks to prepare.
So I have to give a 45 minute lecture on a topic they gave me, and then a couple of hours after that, you kind of stand up and you present all the work, all the papers that were part of the thesis or the work you’ve done and then they basically stand up and in front of all your family and friends and colleagues [00:00:56] [crosstalk] [indiscernible].
So then one of the lecturers there in the medical school in Oslo, and they basically like grill you on all the stuff you’ve done step by step. It was actually really good, it was a really good day and I ended up really enjoying it because my opponents were people that I’d met before and were very much experts, right at the top of my field. We ended up just having a lot of really interesting conversations.
Christopher: What’s the chances of you failing it? Do people come away without their PhD ever?
Tommy: Yeah it can happen. Luckily, the big hurdle is the thesis. So if they think your thesis is good enough to go to a defence, then the major hurdle on the days is the lecture, which you do first thing in the morning. So if you complete the lecture and they think that’s good enough, then the rest of the defence is not for show but it’s very difficult for you to then fail it, because you’ve sort of cleared the major hurdles. The idea is that this sort of defence is more of a way for you to talk about the stuff you’ve done, talk about how you would do things in the future.
The whole idea – if you get a PhD, you’re then in a position to become a professional academic. So the idea of the defence is to test your ability to do that. So lecture the students or create reasons around your experiments, understand what you’re doing and then sort of plan future experiments and understand the limitations of the experiments you’ve done already and kind of work through all of that and then they can kind of say “Oh yeah this person is ready to be a professional academic because they’ve got all the skills necessary to do that.” That’s kind of how…at least in Norway, that’s how they view the defence.
Christopher: Okay and what’s it like now you’ve got it? Was it everything you expected it to be when you start…I mean how many years is it to get this certification?
Tommy: In terms of when I started?
Christopher: Yeah.
Tommy: Yeah so actually I…it was meant to be 4 0years that I was supposed to do it because 25% of my time was meant to teach medical students, which I did do so 25% of my allocated time was spent teaching medical students at the university. So then it’s almost like a three quarters time PhD is then a 3 year PhD is done over 4 years because you spend time teaching. But actually even though I was doing the teaching, I still managed to complete under 3 years. So I essentially finished a year early, which is kind of…which is fairly quick.
And then with the real sort of time now is how long it takes them to organize the defence and then there’ll be some time for them to officially…because then then committee sends in letters saying all this kind of stuff and then the department acknowledges that I’ve got a PhD and then I go to have like an official graduation and all that stuff. So it’ll be like a year after I submit the thesis before you technically have certificate in hand.
Christopher: Cool, cool. I bet your mum’s proud.
Tommy: Yeah she was very proud and my…I had my whole family there and they were all very. My dad too, which he…I guess we didn’t really talk that much about exactly what I was doing my PhD on because he’s a very intense…well not intense but he’s a very high-level academic scientist but not in my field. So this is kind of the first time that both my parents who are academics kind of saw the work that I was doing. So for them I was good, they enjoyed it.
Christopher: Amazing. Is there a PhD gene somewhere? You’ve obviously got it, can we do 23andMe and find out if we’ve got the PhD gene?
Tommy: Yeah maybe. 23andMe have got my…they’ve got my DNA so maybe they can go look at it.
Christopher: Excellent. Well tell us about…we’re going to be in Breckenridge for the Low Carb conference. Tell us about the talk that you’re going to be giving there.
Tommy: Yes this is Low Carb Breckenridge, largely run by Jeff Gerber – you might have heard of his Denver’s Diet Doctor. And it’s Friday the 24th to Sunday the 26th of February and I – in typical me style – I’m going to give a talk about why low carb diets maybe aren’t always a good thing, purely based on our experiences. So often when people come and see us or talk to us or people I interact with online, they’ve read all the blogs, listened to all the podcasts, they know all the basics. They’re doing the low carb, they’re doing the fasting, they’re doing the proteus restriction, whatever.
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Tommy: And it either hasn’t helped or it initially helped and then it stopped helping or it’s made them worse. So I kind of…it’s really important to me that people realize that what my work…you sort of make this sweeping generalizations “Oh everybody should just eat a low carb diet and then we’d fix all these problems in the world.” Actually while that may be true for some people, it’s not true for everybody and I genuinely believe that any system you have of disease, cause of disease or treatments of disease should encompass all the [00:05:51] [indiscernible] that come up and I don’t think that just carb restriction is enough to cover all causes of metabolic disease.
And one thing that I think is kind of…it kind of comes and goes but it’s never really brought to the forefront is [00:06:05] [indiscernible] or LPS translocation across the gut wall and the effect that has on [00:06:11] [indiscernible], why insulin is actually potentially beneficial if you have a high LPS load and it might actually be [00:06:20] [indiscernible] response of the body to try and motivate some of the information that you get from these bacterial toxins crossing the gut, why some of that might be happening, including some of the things that can increase [00:06:32] [indiscernible] of LPS across the gut line, refined fats – including things like cream and coconut oil and all that kind of stuff that becomes a staple on the low carb diet.
And then why sometimes going potentially in the other direction if you’re in a really severe situation like cutting out things like fats and sugar which can cause some of that translocation or some of that problem with the gut and the toxins crossing the gut and then affecting the body might be something like more of a plant-based whole foods diet, low-fat diet that I think may benefit some people.
So just to kind of show why low-fat diets or low carb diets may not work and there are a number of people in this kind of…even well-known people in this area who have been following a low carb diet and yet their…particularly things like they’re [00:07:24] [indiscernible] calcium score haven’t improved or have worsened on a low carb diet and then they’re stuck looking for an answer because they’ve cut out all the carbs and what do they do next?
And I think this is probably one of the reasons why people are failing is because they haven’t fixed their gut before they start pouring loads of fat down their neck. And then I think one way to address that is first by removing the fat from the diet, fix the gut and then you can go towards something that’s more…a sustainable, more low carb diet going forward. So I think it’s got to do with what people have going on in their gut before they start the diet and then sometimes just going low-carb isn’t going to fix that because you may actually be exasperating some of the things that are going on.
Christopher: I like it. I’m looking forward to it. So I’m going to have to turn this podcast around pretty quick, otherwise it’s going to be very short notice but I know Denver is well connected by aeroplanes so hopefully people can come and see the Low Carb Breckenridge conference. And I’ll put the link in the show notes. So come to the show notes and you’ll find the link to the event. And the line-up is fantastic, there’s some really interesting people speaking there.
Tommy: Oh yeah, I mean it really is a who’s who of that kind of line of thinking. So the people who…so low carb is now kind of encompassed of intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding and protein restriction. Some of the people who are talking more about that, people like Rom Ronsdale and some of the more I guess like holistic medical practitioners. So I think [00:08:51] [indiscernible] is going to be there – who I’m a big fan of – and anybody else you can think of. [00:08:57] [indiscernible]. It’s a huge list so people are into that kind of area then it really is the place to be.
Christopher: Yeah and then just a few weeks later -- Saturday the 11th of March – I’m going to be in Denver to see Bryan Walsh, who is the fantastic naturopathic doctor that’s been in my podcast a couple of times. I’ll link the 2 episodes I recorded with Bryan, and Bryan is going to be teaching functional blood chemistry analysis in Denver which I’m so excited about. I’ve learned so much from this guy and to meet him in person and to learn from him in person is going to be absolutely phenomenal. So I’m hoping people can make that, Saturday the 11th of March. I guess that’s going to be a more technical one for the practitioner’s listening.
Christopher: Yeah and I think it’s naturally worth it so if anybody is maybe hoping to try and increase their skills in terms of analysing blood chemistry, I mean Bryan is the go-to person to learn from. And we have no skin in that game other than we really love Bryan and his work and we definitely think people could learn a lot from him.
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Tommy: Yeah absolutely, absolutely. Really looking forward to that. Okay so for this podcast, the main meat of it, I wanted it to be a checklist of things that people should be doing before they get into more complicated stuff where more complicated stuff is bio-hacking or testing or just anything complicated, really. And the reason I wanted to do this was there was some interaction on Gabor’s lower insulin group – which I’ll link to – it’s a really fantastic place to get some really in-depth technical discussions and references for the whole idea of lowering your insulin. And I made a proposition of things that everybody should be doing in order to get the results that they want. And the suggestion was made that maybe the list was too difficult and that we needed to find the 80/20 principle and just kind of cut it all down.
And that was kind of surprising and disheartening to me because I thought the list was not very complicated. So I really wanted to go through this with you right now, Tommy, and see whether you think it’s too complicated and see if you agree with my list of things.
Tommy: Yeah, great.
Christopher: Okay alright, well let’s get into it. So in no particular order, I think…I mean you’re looking at this list in front of you right now too and would you agree that there’s no particular order. Like who knows what’s going to be the most important thing for you? Maybe that’s where working with a coach comes in, because you can have a jamming session, like you talk about the things that might be important, you talk about the things that you’re doing or not doing. And so each person’s going to be different in that regard. But it seems like food is a really good place to start, and so my suggestion was a minimally processed diet, free of added sugar and vegetable oil was probably something that everybody should be doing.
Tommy: And I think where…most of where the discussion comes from in terms of trying to improve health, and I guess where a lot of people are focusing on is like a population level. So if you had to fix one thing for everybody, then most people would want to start with food. And then where you go from there could be…people would be like “Well you need to restrict carbohydrates” or other people say “We need to restrict animal foods or you need to restrict fat.” And I think there’s like we’ve already briefly mentioned, I think there’s potential benefit from all sides of that equation, but then it’s going to be tailored more to the individual person. But I don’t even think the restricting in particular macronutrient is necessary that important for most people, because I think what you basically need to do is just eat real food.
It’s going to be some vegetables, some meat, fish, could be some nuts, could definitely include whole fruit. Also legumes or beans, lentils, all that kind of stuff and I think even if you went to that and you truly ate like that, I think for most people it’s going to be enough and it’s not going to require any kind of macronutrient manipulation or anything like that, because it’s just a number of things about food processing – and that includes processing fats -- [00:13:25] [indiscernible] is part of a low-carbohydrate diet that definitely have a lot of potential and negative effects. I think when people go on…so say you and I definitely would lump ourselves more within the low carbohydrate group of things, although I’m not behold to that at all and I think a lot of where the issue rises with something like a low-carb diet is that people will eat whatever they want as long as it doesn’t have carbs in.
And as soon as you’re eating mainly Quest bars and just buttering cream in your coffee and processed protein chips and some other kind of liquid fat that’s full of emulsifiers and crap, you’re just undoing all that good work and thinking that just because you’re restricting carbohydrate, you’re just ending up eating a low carb processed version of the food that got you in trouble in the first place. So I think what’s much more important than restricting individual macronutrients is just removing all of those processed factors.
Christopher: Yeah absolutely, absolutely.
Tommy: And so in terms of the notes, there’s a lot of things that those processed foods – including sugars, including all sorts of processed oils and fats. We focus on vegetable oil but I think large amounts of just processed fat in general, whether it’s saturated or not, can cause issues. And there’s lots of reasons why they can cause issues and I kind of touched upon it. A lot of it I believe either is to do with the amount that you are able to eat off them, so they are very calorie dense and that can have some problems in its own right because I think where a lot of the problems come in is that our environment – all the other things we’re going to talk about next – other than food, change or worsen our ability to regulate our own appetite. So then when you’re faced with food that’s very easy to eat and overeat, then you’re going to cause [00:15:21] [indiscernible] problems from there.
[00:15:22]
Tommy: And if you have…if you then have any shifts in say the gut microbium or packages within the gut which you and I see a lot of so that’s kind of like a…it’s a self-selecting population so it’s not necessarily a problem that everybody has. But we know that as you go towards metabolic disease, you definitely have negative shifts in the gut [00:15:44] [indiscernible] and if you then allow those bugs to have access to the rest of your body, then of course a lot of problems like inter-resistance, leptin resistance. And when those happen in the brain, then again it regulates or reduces your ability to sense appetite cues or normal hunger cues and then again sort of cause it to over-read, so.
On multiple levels…oh and we haven’t even mentioned things like emulsifiers which can also reduce the space between the bugs and the gut wall, which means they’re much more likely to get across the gut wall and into the bloodstream and into the rest of the body. So which also crop up in low carb foods because you need to find a way to make all that fat come together in some kind of mass that you can package and then consume or store on a shelf for however long. So I think those are also potentially a problem. So if you get rid of all of that stuff, then I think you’ve ticked the boxes and you probably don’t need to worry that much anymore and then the other stuff is going to be much more important.
Christopher: I didn’t mentioned gluten and dairy, but they are the 2 most common food allergens that we see with the clients that we work with. And I think that for a lot of people, removing those from their diet can be really important but I would hesitate to make that as a general recommendation, don’t you agree?
Tommy: Yeah absolutely. I don’t think that they’re necessarily a problem for everybody but by any stretch, I think where people do see benefit either. They are the most common…they are 2 of the most common food allergens along with soy and eggs, and if you have some problems with those foods, then obviously taking them out is going to be beneficial. But equally, just removing things that are made of wheat – bread, cookies, pancakes – none of that stuff has anything that your body really needs.
So if you’re taking those out, it’s giving you much more space to eat nutrient-dense foods that are going to be much more useful in terms of the overall nutrition that they provide. So I think that those are 2 of the main benefits that you get from reducing those in the diet. But again, definitely don’t think it needs to be like a broad-scale recommendation, and there’s lots of diets where if you actually eat truly whole grains, like wholegrain barley in a stew or something like that, I have no problem with that.
Christopher: While we’re here, give me your latest opinion on food sensitivity testing. So this came up as a question from a client yesterday and my opinion is still what it was in the beginning – why would you spend $400 to $600 on a test when you can just do an elimination diet? But some people, they really don’t want to do the elimination diet. So tell me what your latest opinion is on food sensitivity testing.
Tommy: Yeah so, I mean I genuinely tend to agree with you just because I always want to go with the thing that’s free and something that everybody has access to, even though it requires more work. And I think actually the fact that it requires more work is useful, because what it requires of you is the time and investment to actually understand how food affects your body and I know that for you – when you changed your diet and you became much more aware of how different foods affect your body and your performance particularly as an athlete – then I think you get a much better understanding of everything about your body. But then also you are in a more mindful state and you understand your body much better when you know that that’s going to give you improved health outcomes too.
Christopher: Yes, it’s the mindfulness. That’s all it is. That’s all it is, is the simple art of noticing as [00:19:15] [indiscernible]. said – you’ve really got to notice what happens when you put something into your body. And the food sensitivity testing – it may be a good jumping off point, right. You have this list of foods and like “Well that’s an interesting idea. Maybe blueberries are causing me a problem. It seems unlikely but maybe.” And then you can still do the noticing part and perhaps that will get you the right outcome, but I still say that you don’t really need to do the test.
Tommy: Yeah I mean there’s 2…so if you do like formal antibody testing in the blood, like if [00:19:44] [indiscernible], that’s probably…that’s considered the gold standard of the tests. The true gold standard of assessing a food sensitivity is the elimination diet. But then there are other tests like the outcast or immediate release test, and they’re not very well-validated. And what it tends to crop up actually is when you see lots of red boxes on your food sensitivity test, it’s often things that your body or your bloodstream, your immune system is being exposed to which it wouldn’t normally like to be exposed to.
[00:20:18]
Tommy: So it’s often a lot of the things you’re currently eating and that doesn’t mean you’re actually sensitive or averse to those things. What it usually means is that your gut barrier isn’t currently strong enough and those things you are eating and crossing before they’re fully digested or before they’re fully absorbed certain antigens from those foods are crossing the gut barrier and then the [00:20:43] [indiscernible] or the immune system is being exposed to them which it wouldn’t normally be. So it’s actually the body is just reacting to foods that it’s seeing every day but it’s not because the food’s an issue, it’s because the gut is the issue.
Christopher: Alright selling me something else.
Tommy: Yeah so often what I tend to see when I see those results is all the foods of the person is currently eating is the ones that the body is supposedly allergic to. And then “Oh my God everything I’m eating is bad for me” but no. It’s actually because there’s a problem with the gut barrier and it’s not specifically the foods.
Christopher: Okay. Alright so that’s the food part, minimally-processed food, freed of added sugar and vegetable oils.
Tommy: I include all the processed fats there. If you have a crappy gut that’s full of e-coli and klebsiella and you’ve got no bifido and you’ve got no [00:21:33] [indiscernible] and all that stuff. You’ve got no mucin lining, the best way to get that – those endotoxins [00:21:40] [indiscernible]. The best way to get those endotoxins into your bloodstream is to drink bulletproof coffee.
Christopher: Yeah that’s a really good point, that’s a really good point. But I have to say that the paleo diet, it still is a really good template to say to someone who doesn’t…who’s completely new to all of this stuff. They just need a list of foods. In the beginning you just need a list of foods, right, and you need meal planners and you need shopping lists and all of that kind of stuff and we’re now at the point where there’s so many great resources out there. So if you just want to give somebody one keyword that’ll allow them to unlock the solution, the paleo diet – I think – is still the best keyword.
Tommy: And if you – and I always bring this up at this point – because if you look at the original paleo diet as described by Eaton and Connor and then [00:22:23] [indiscernible] in 1985, it was a relatively low-fat, relatively high carbohydrate diet. [00:22:30] [indiscernible].
Christopher: Well let’s move on to the next point which is sufficient sleep. We have not seen anybody do well on 6 hours of sleep, and I don’t know, what do you think Tommy?
Tommy: So I think this is one of the first places where people try and bio-hack – if you want to call it that way – like get around the sleeping. So everybody knows that they need to sleep, but there’s always a short term thing that’s stopping you from sleeping in terms of the amount you need to get done or other stresses in your life. You’re always then trying to find a way to get past the sleep. So like “Well yes I know that I need to sleep more but right now, I would rather just take the pills, take the supplements and get around it.” And I think that’s where a lot of people get into trouble because as I always like to say, there’s no biological free lunch. So anything that you do to try and get performance out of your body that it isn’t willing to already give you, it is going to then…you’re going to pay for it later.
Just like any time you go out on your bike and you do intervals for 2 hours, you then need to rest and recover afterwards. Or how many deadlifts, how many squats? You always need the recovery time, and I think a lot of people very similarly want – and this is what I see more in the bio-hacking community – is maximum cognitive performance all the time. So I want to perform at 110% all day, every day. And the body doesn’t work like that, right, and so particularly if you are pushing yourself to the day, including taking supplements it might be to try and increase your transportive function, increase brain function, increase cognition. You then need to give your body adequate time to recover from that, and the only way you can do that is by sleeping.
So [00:24:29] [indiscernible] more supplements, more pushing yourself and then never taking the time to recover. And a lot of people…there’s discussions about how much sleep you actually get in the ancestral communities versus how much we get in western communities but in general, we know that people in western societies spend less time in bed and probably in general get less quality sleep and there are a number of reasons for that. And that in the long term is associated with multiple things like types diabetes, cancers, Alzheimer’s disease. So really one of the first things you need to do is sleep properly, and that comes in line with a proper circadian rhythm which is one of the other things we’ll talk about.
[00:25:18]
Tommy: So just sleep isn’t…in order to have a good sleep health, you also need to have good circadian health and there’s other ways to set that too but making sure you have really good sleep hygiene and allow yourself that time to sleep is going to be really important.
Christopher: I think it was Dr Kirk Parsly [name uncertain] and I’ve interviewed him and I’ll link to that episode. And I’m not sure if he said this in the interview but I’m certain it was him that said it, and that’s “Selling sleep should be like selling sex.” It’s so true, it should be so easy to sell and I remember when I couldn’t sleep very well, I was looking to Tim Farris for things like polyphasic sleep and I was like “Oh well maybe I can just turn my insomnia into something that’s an advantage or productivity hack.”
And now I sleep like a baby, I really do. I get…take last night for example. I rode my bike for over 5 hours yesterday and then last night I slept for 10 hours, I think. And I share a room with a 3 year old, so like if anything I didn’t get up, I didn’t wake up at all. I just woke up and it was morning, it’s absolutely amazing. I can’t ever imagine going back to the idea of “Oh polyphasic sleep, that sounds like a good idea.” You would never even think of that, right? So I wonder whether the people who are pursuing that stuff is just because they can’t sleep properly, that’s all it is.
Tommy: Yeah so then…I mean most people…I mean there’s almost like a catch-22 situation because they know they need to sleep more but then they can’t sleep more and they try and find ways around needing to sleep more, and then it sort of spirals downwards. So at some point, you need to find a way to break that cycle and for a lot of people, that will take a good amount of concerted effort. But like you say, in terms of the long term benefits, I mean they definitely are huge.
Christopher: I think this would be a good time to separate into talking about sunlight exposure because the two sort of go hand in hand, don’t you think?
Tommy: Yeah definitely and if people remember the podcast we did with Chris [00:27:13] [indiscernible], we kind of touched on this. I think sleep and dark is really important, so along with the sleep hygiene is blue-light exposure late at night and stresses late at night and appropriately winding down in those 2 to 4 hours before bedtime which is where you sort of allow your melatonin to rise so that you can sleep properly. But the corollary of that is needing adequate light exposure during the day to allow that rhythm to happen because generally during the day, we’re not exposed to – even though we’re exposed to light, it’s not as much light as we would be exposed to if we were outside all day which is what we should be doing.
So making sure that you get real adequate sunlight during the day is going to be the main…is the main way you set the central circadian rhythm. So within the brain is light exposure, so bright light during the day is absolutely what you need in order to then get good sleep late at night to sort of help set that rhythm. And most people with their inside don’t get exposed to that so getting outside and getting exposed to sunlight is probably the most important thing that most people don’t do and we can’t…so lots of people focus on the bright lights and [00:28:30] [indiscernible] light at night, but then don’t take the opportunity to get exposed to as much bright light during the day as possible.
Christopher: Yes that is absolutely what I’m seeing with talking to clients is everybody knows about flux now, everybody’s wearing the blue blocking glasses, everybody knows they should be powering down their laptop. But when you talk to them – I had a client call at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning and I said to them “Have you been outside yet?” They’re like “No, it’s raining out.” I’m like “Argh no, that’s not…” And then later on in the conversation will be “What have you got to increase testosterone?” and I always talk about that paper “Bright light increase luteinizing hormone, improves body composition.”
That’s the solution, I love it because it costs nothing, anyone can do it. All you got to do is go outside first thing in the morning and you can expect to see an improvement in your hormones and I just love that stuff and I always make a point of doing that now. First thing in the morning, my daughter and I get our jackets on and we go outside and just sort of walk around the garden, invent things to do. That’s all it’s for, just to get that light exposure. I think it’s really important.
Tommy: I don’t think…I really don’t think you can understate the importance of that. Everything…when you talk to somebody who’s inside all day, working hard to be healthier and they’re just not getting exposed to sunlight. Very little of it is going to work and I remember you and I having this conversation recently where online we often see people, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, you’re debating about whether or not taking magnesium citrate – so the citrate in your magnesium supplement will enter your Krebs cycle and cause anaplerosis which will then reduce your ketone levels or taking…all the benefits of taking carotene when you’re on a low carb diet and when you’re doing this at 2 o’clock in the morning, we were joking at the time that you need carotene because you need a low carb diet.
[00:30:28]
Tommy: Low carb diet because your circadian rhythm and your environment is screwed. So if you actually just fix the environment, you wouldn’t need any…you wouldn’t need the low carb diet, you wouldn’t need the carotene supplement and actually you’d be a sleeper too in the morning rather than on Facebook debating about supplements or something, right. And that’s…it’s a really boring answer but that’s really what people need to start doing.
Christopher: Yeah absolutely. So that’s sunlight intimately tied in with good sleep, I think. Okay so let’s move on to the next thing which is the appropriate management of stress and something that I’ve learned about more recently from Bryan Walsh linked to this interview, social connectedness and purpose. Just one of these things where I realize with hindsight that I’ve solved this problem by leaving a job as a computer programmer, a hedge fund, and I just got an email this afternoon just before we started this podcast from a recruiter that was looking for a quantitative analyst in midtown Manhattan, and the starting salary was $200,000. I’m thinking “Yeah that sounds okay, I could do that for a while.”
But you know, I was really not into my job when I was a computer programmer and now I absolutely love what I do. Like I really can’t get enough of it and I’m amazed my wife hasn’t got bored of me yet and at some point she probably will but I just love what I do. And that may turn out to be really, really important for health and longevity, wouldn’t you agree?
Tommy: Oh yeah, I mean there’s a huge body of literature about – not just in terms of stress and social connectedness, but about the benefits of having purpose. So having some kind of purpose in your life. So you don’t necessarily…and even if you look at something like happiness, actually somebody is happy all the time but doesn’t have any purpose in their life and actually doesn’t get any of the long term health benefits of being happy.
So having that purpose and then something that you do every day that you enjoy or you’re contributing to the greater good, you’re part of a community that you are helping in some way – that has real documented benefits in terms of long term health and even on the bi-chemical level, changes gene expression, changes the way your immune system works and again I’ll mention Bryan Walsh because he was the one who – even you mentioned him already – but he was the one who really highlighted a lot of this and people should go back and listen to that podcast where he talks about some of this.
And on every level, both from epidemiology all the way down to basic bi-chemistry, there’s a huge amount of information about how the way that we react to stresses and the way we interact with other people and being part of a group and feeling supported and loved has a huge effect on our health. And again, we’re starting to look at things like…things that affect the way we then interact with the environment and by the environment I’m mainly talking about something like food. As I said earlier, in terms of there’s lots of bad food out there that we’re kind of driven to overeat but what I truly think drives us to then overeat that food which probably isn’t that good for us is the fact that we don’t have a proper circadian rhythm, we don’t sleep properly, we don’t have any kind of social connectedness.
And all of that increases information, decreases our ability to regulate our appetite and yes that’s important for [00:34:02] [indiscernible], also important for metabolic disease. But even if you’re not somebody who’s struggling with those things, if you’re an athlete, somebody who’s just trying to perform better – all of those things I think are higher up than the food that you eat and all of those cause basic dysregulation that then affects your ability to perform. So it’s very difficult to give you an exact –particularly when we’re talking about social connection – it’s very difficult to give you an exact like “Tell me what to do.”
But we know how important it is. So it could be you go out, you find yourself a community. It could be around a sport, a team sport, it could be a knitting club, it could be cookery lessons, it could be ballroom dancing lessons, it could be anything. Literally anything that you’re interested in and anything [00:34:54] [indiscernible] kind of go out and come together with other people around some kind of joined goal, is going to have a huge benefit.
Christopher: Yeah, I don’t want people to think that they have to quit their job in order to achieve this, because that’s what I did, you know.
[00:35:08]
Tommy: But maybe some people would do…
Christopher: Maybe some people do, but I do get this feeling that I am contributing to a cause that’s greater than me. So I’ll give you an example from today. I saw some blood chemistry where we had basically reversed somebody’s thyroid auto-immunities, so their thyroid TPO antibodies came back down to the normal range and the haemoglobin was up by a whole point which is going to make a huge difference to this particular athlete’s performance. And I’m thinking “Shit, I’m contributing to something that’s bigger than me when you add all these people up.” That’s amazing but I know that’s difficult, like not everybody can quit their job and start a business in health coaching, it’s a tough one.
Tommy: But then equally not everybody’s interested in starting a business in health coaching. Maybe somebody wants to go out and help their community in other ways.
Christopher: I really recommend Sir Ken Robinson’s book on finding your passion. He’s done a few of those books and a TED talk too that I should link to and I think those books might help people understand how they might find their passion and contribute to a cause that’s greater than them.
Tommy: Yeah I think the first one’s called The Element and then a follow-up called Finding Your Element. And I mean his TED talk is the most-watched TED talk of all time.
Christopher: Oh is it? I didn’t know that.
Tommy: Yeah its number 1 I think on their top 20 list but even if you’ve watched it before, you should still go watch it again. I think I watched it again very recently just because it’s awesome.
Christopher: Yeah cool, I’ll link to all those. So what about stress? I know this was another difficult one to crack because as Robert Sapolsky wrote about in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, talked about how humans are the only animals that invent things, invent stress when that don’t have any. So I can talk to somebody that has no financial concerns, no worries for the kids, no worries with their job, their training’s going great and still they feel stressed out and it’s just because they’re inventing something to be stressed about. So the stress is not going anywhere even if you do have lots of real stress and so the only thing you can do is improve your resilience. And we found tools like headspace to be really good at that. But that’s not universally true, you are the keeper of the special information and you’re going to have to find the thing that helps you become more resilient to stress.
Tommy: I think again part of that process is that mindful aspect. It’s so important because everything that we’ve talked about today about how you eat, how you sleep, how you interact with others, how you manage stress – all of that should come about in a mindful manner where you make a change, see how that change affects you and then it’s like an ongoing interactive process. So only you can really figure out what you need to do to better handle stressful situations. And I mean it’s very easy for us to talk about this and I often find myself in a situation where I’m very bad at handling the stressful situation and I don’t pretend otherwise.
But it’s just a case of each person individually figuring out whether it be…again you could do that with somebody else in terms of just taking some time to discuss things through with somebody else. It could be journaling, it could be mindfulness, you could use headspace or calm or something like that. And as you find things that work, then just build…turn them into habits that make you more resilient the rest of the time.
Christopher: Absolutely. Okay so let’s move on to the next thing which is appropriate movement. And the reason I say appropriate is because I think most people listening to this podcast will be an athlete of some sort and so they’ll be moving their body but they may not be moving it in the way in which it was designed to – use the word with air quotes around. So I’ll give you an example – I spend a lot of time on a mountain bike which is a seated position spinning little circles and I remain very unconvinced that that was the movement that my body was intended to do and so I may run into some problems if I don’t do the movement that seems more likely that my body was designed to do which is walking.
So each person again is going to be different but I think that walking is really, really important and I have to say the whole point of me going through this list is I’m sure everybody listening will know about all of the things that we’ve talked about. But my question to you is are you actually doing it? And so I know this is my problem right now, especially working from home. I’m not walking enough, so what do you think Tommy? You getting enough walking at the moment?
Tommy: It does depend from day to day based on how late we are for work. So but generally I walk 5 or 10 minutes to and from the [00:39:43] [indiscernible]. I probably walk for about an hour a day in intermittent bursts. I would probably think I need more than that when I start working from home full time soon, I’m going to obviously have concern to build that into my day and actually, what I didn’t mention is I have a dog, Parker, who I go out and walk every morning at least twice. So even though it’s short, we probably might do a couple of quick sprints uphill and run around a little bit. So all of it luckily because of the various things I do during my day all sort of adds up. I probably walk at least an hour, an hour and a half every day but equally, we’re probably designed – ‘designed’, again in air quotes – to…
Christopher: I hate that word, [00:40:27] [indiscernible] it seems.
[00:40:29]
Tommy: Yeah, to do that more often.
Christopher: Right. And I know this from…I’ve interviewed Katy Bowman which I should link to, and I’ve also interviewed Kelly Stara – all the experts are saying the same thing. And I’m seriously considering getting a dog because I’m that sort of purpose-driven person – or problem-driven is maybe a better expression – that I’m just not going to go out and do that walking for no reason and because we live in the woods and there’s no shops, there’s no restaurants, there’s no anything around here. Like there’s nowhere to walk to, so I need a reason to walk and I don’t know, what do you reckon? Do you think a dog is a good reason?
Tommy: I think that…as I said at a bio-hacking conference I presented at last year, I think the dog is the best bio hack possible because it fixes…the dog fixes most of the things actually we’ve talked about today. It can reduce stress, reduce social isolation, it gets you out during the day, and it gets you moving. If you eat when the dog eats and sleep when the dog sleeps, you’re probably in a pretty good…you’re probably going to be in a pretty good spot, and I mean again you can talk about loads of mechanistic studies that have shown the other benefits of dogs but in reality, man’s best friend. It pretty much helps you do everything you need to do that you aren’t doing already that could improve your health.
Christopher: You say that it’s stress-reducing until you get a terrier and then the thing gets eaten by a mountain lion. And you’re like that guy posting on Facebook “Has anybody seen my terrier?” It’s like some mountain lion walking around somewhere with a big fat belly.
Tommy: Okay well appropriate dog.
Christopher: Sized dog. Yeah apparently even the big dogs run into trouble around here because the coyotes, they’re clever enough to lure the dogs away – just a single coyote – and then they get into a pack and they kill him. So it’s like really…then you got to explain to your 3 year old where the dog went.
Tommy: Well I think you just have to keep your dog indoors during the day.
Christopher: Yeah that might be the solution.
Tommy: Do you have wooden floors?
Christopher: We do, yeah.
Tommy: Dogs on wooden floors, it’s not often a good combination. It’s like ice skating.
Christopher: I’m sure we’ll find a solution. Okay so I’m going to recap at this point, so there is the minimally processed diet, you’ve got sufficient sleep – and I’m going to say 8 hours as an arbitrary number. We’ve not seen people do very well on less than 8 hours of sleep. Some like during the day. The appropriate management of stress and social connectedness and appropriate movement, so that’s my question to you is not do you know about those things, are you doing those things? There’s a difference, there really is a difference. Oh and there’s a bonus thing, and this bonus thing came from Lola Insulin Group. Ivan Cummings who’s done a lot of research and he said magnesium deficiency and I would agree with him there. What do you think Tommy?
Tommy: Yeah I think magnesium intake or increasing magnesium intake is one of the simplest ways to particularly… so he focuses on things like inter-resistance, cardiovascular disease and increase in magnesium intake has a dramatic effect on cardiovascular disease. So yeah I think magnesium is a simple one. We’ve also added zinc to that list because everybody we see is going to be deficient in zinc, particularly…it’s definitely a problem for athletes, so we joke that we’ll just hose everybody down with magnesium and zinc. As soon as they walk through the Nourish Balance Thrive door, they just get hosed down with those 2 and that will sort of give them a running start.
So yes, so I guess it’s important to mention that there are a number of like individual deficiencies that we can test for and treat, and they are important. But equally, anything that we end up doing with clients in terms of testing and treatment, the basics are always the same. The basics are real food, sleep, movement, sunlight, some way to manage stress and increase your purpose in life. All of that stuff that gives you the grounding to then fix whatever else is going on.
Christopher: You know, I think this might be a good time to mention that I’m going to start sending an email once a week to people who sign up at nourishbalancethrive.com/highlights. And that email is going to contain the most interesting things that we’ve seen that week, so we work in what I think is quite a novel way using this internet chat application Slack, and we obviously hover around the internet, stalking mostly, not doing much talking because we do this for a living, we’re worried about getting dragged into a conversation.
But we scour the internet and we find the most interesting things and they all get posted in our Slack channel and I think pretty much everybody watches everything. And what we’re going to do is vote on the most interesting things that we see during the week, and I think we should pay particular attention to the things that are most actionable. So for example, I mentioned that study earlier – the “Bright light exposure improves body composition and increase luteinizing hormones.”
[00:45:28]
Christopher: I think that’s a really great example of a study that might make it into the highlights email because it’s so goddamn actionable. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. But I think that Tommy, who is obviously in this Slack channel, should have the ultimate say in what makes it into the email or not. What do you think, Tommy?
Tommy: Well yeah so much, I mean so much good stuff comes up and like you say, we read a huge number of newsletters on a…you and I both spend a huge amount of time scouring through [00:46:02] [indiscernible] various things, listening to other people’s podcast, all those stuff and we won’t pretend that we always have all the answers but we usually know where to get those answers and we’re constantly having that information come in and it’s constantly changing the way that we work, the way that we treat people, the way that we help people improve their performance.
So as we learn new things, find these studies, things that people should be incorporating into their day, into their program, we will put together just a few – 2 or 3 things every week – that sort of give the basis for that, and it could be scientific or a discussion or a news piece or podcast or whatever and ways to actually act on that and use it to improve health.
Christopher: Yeah and I know what you’re thinking – I need another email like I need a hole in the head. So I promise you I’m going to keep it really, really brief, very, very actionable. It’s almost going to be like working with us as a client. You’re just going to get 1 or 2 things each week that you can get done and we’re really confident that it’s going to improve your health, your longevity and your performance.
Tommy: So that’s nourishbalancethrive.com/highlights.
Christopher: Highlights, yeah. And I’ll link to that in the show note. So if you’re listening in Overcast – which I recommend that you do because it’s a really cool app – if you look on the details page for this episode, you’ll find the link to sign up for the email address email list there. Okay so because everybody is already doing all of the things that we talked about and they’re not sure that they’re getting the very best out of their performance, maybe we should talk a little bit about the testing that we do. And specifically, I wanted to talk about some of the recent changes that we’ve made.
So specifically the non-metal environmental pollutants that we’ve been experimenting with recently. If you remember – and I’ll link to this again in the show notes – back in September I interviewed Dr Bill Shaw, who is the clinical chemist and founder of The Great Plains Laboratory. And we talked about these non-metal environmental pollutants and I did this urine test where they looked for stuff that I had been recently exposed to and Dr Shaw said that it was one of the cleanest tests that he had ever seen. And then in December, I interviewed Todd Becker about getting stronger and the idea of hormesis and I mentioned that I was worried about wood smoke. And Tommy, I know you had some thoughts about that interview, so maybe I should give you a chance to express those.
Tommy: Yeah it was really interesting. So you were worried about smoke from your wood stove and actually you saw a marker on your non-metal tox screen which suggested high exposure to some kind of smoke or is associated with smoke exposure. And so in that interview with Todd Becker, you mentioned your worries and I think he said…so a lot of the stuff he talks about things that we are…stresses that we are exposed to that end up making us stronger – so the effect of hormesis. And he thought that smoke exposure and other one which is very related is the advanced location end product or other things that are generated on meat when you cook them over fire or a high heat – like fry them or bake them.
And actually this has kind of been recently in the news, is acrylamide, which you get on things like toast and fried potatoes and things like that which also supposedly associated with cancer. And he mentioned that the body is probably used to dealing with those things as we developed fire how many hundreds of thousands of years ago, we can probably deal with it. And in general that’s true, but hormesis but the other thing that you have to speak about in the same breath is allostatic load, which is basically the total number of stresses that your body is exposed to.
And I think particularly if you’re already in a state of metabolic derangement, then adding more on top of that isn’t necessarily good thing. So particularly the best example I have is of the agents. So the advanced location end products in people with type 2 diabetes – they’ve done multiple studies – if you instruct them on ways to reduce the agents in the diet – so not frying, not baking, not cooking at high temperature and not burning anything.
[00:50:26]
Tommy: And that’s all you do. You don’t change microbes, you don’t change calories, anything like that. You automatically see an improvement in glucose tolerance and insulin resistance. So just by reducing that portion of the allostatic load in people who already have metabolic derangements, you see benefit. But equally if you did the same thing in healthy people and they’ve done that too, you don’t really see any difference. So if you’re healthy, then those things can be beneficial or at least not detrimental. But if you’re already in a state of derangement, then those things can potentially be damaging and removing them can be beneficial. So all depends on the total load that your body’s exposed to. You can’t say “Well it’s just hormesis and therefore it’s good for you.”
Christopher: So I’d highly recommend the interview still with Todd, I think that once you understand the principles of hormesis, the world just makes a lot more sense. But we did – I think – miss that really key point which is the allostatic load and I think that all the athletes are going to understand this because you could be under a lot of training load of one type. Say you’re doing a lot of running or swimming or cycling and then say you were over-trained and I was to come along and say “Well all you need to do is some more deadlifting because hormesis.” Like you would appreciate that that’s not going to make you stronger.
Tommy: Yeah it’s just you can’t add to…if there’s already enough of a burden on your body and again it goes to all the stuff you talked about earlier, it could be stress or over-training or not sleeping enough or not eating properly or whatever, adding more stresses on top of that isn’t going to make you any better. So it just depends on where you’re starting and what you need to change in order to get better.
Christopher: Yeah okay. So yeah I talked about the wood burning stove and the reason I have a wood burning stove is because we live in the woods and there’s lots of wood around us and people tend to burn wood for heat around here. We don’t have forced air, we don’t have any other source of heat and so that’s what we’ve got and I kind of liked it. I kind of like staring at the wood burning stove, it’s that kind of hypnotic sort of glow thing that’s very cool to look at and the stove itself doesn’t look uncool. And then I really, really enjoy walking to the end of the garden to get some more wood for the wood burning stove. It gets me outside, it gets me moving. And then the coolest thing about the wood burning stove is splitting the wood.
So you have somebody come to your house and they cut down some trees and hopefully don’t squash your house. And they leave you with these things called rounds, and then I’ve got this super cool splitting mould that I got from Amazon.com, maybe I’ll link to this. It’s a really interesting tool, so it looks like an axe but it’s really a cross between an axe and a sledgehammer. And when you hit one of these rounds of wood, they nearly always split with the first strike, and it’s the most gratifying feeling you’ve ever had. Well no that’s probably not true, but it’s pretty good.
It’s definitely more gratifying than swinging a kettlebell, I can tell you that. So really, really cool feeling, splitting the wood. There was a lot I liked about the wood burning stove, and then one of the amazing things about doing a podcast is that not only do you get to interview some of the world’s best experts on any particular topic, have somebody who would normally never have time for you give you their time, but then also they listen to your podcast and they give you feedback later on. So I interviewed Joshua [00:53:33] [indiscernible], who is one half of the minimalists and he sent me this really interesting article called The Fireplace Delusion that was written by Sam Harris and of course I’ll link to that in the show notes.
That article references a really nice review paper about wood smoke and at that point I’m thinking “Oh shit. I really do not want to be burning wood for heat.” And I redid the urinary toxicity test and I found an elevation of this metabolite, the parent chemical is 1, 3-butediene and I found another paper called “The effects of smoking cessation on 8 urinary tobacco carcinogen and toxicant bio-markers” and I will of course link to that one too. And basically what that study showed was that after 58 days, most of the carcinogens and the toxicants that are in a smoker’s urine go away. So when you stop smoking, good stuff happens, and I’m thinking “Crap, I really, really don’t want this wood burning stove.” But luckily I’ve got Tommy around that can just double-check me, that I’m not going insane. So what do you think, did you think this really is a risk, Tommy?
Tommy: I think it’s difficult. In reality, considering…so like you said, if you look at the other things that you have on your non-metal tox screen, there’s not really much else going on. The one thing that’s elevates is almost certainly due ti the new wood burning stove and it’s like everything. It goes back to the allostatic load. So we know you’re feeling good, performing well, all your other markers look pretty good. If you have some other problems, it’s probably with some other stuff and it’s probably not to do with the wood burning stove. So in somebody like you who’s otherwise healthy, I probably wouldn’t worry about it that much. But you know it takes a look at the big picture to not worry about it rather than just say “Oh you’ll probably be fine.”
[00:55:29]
Christopher: Yeah. Maybe it is offset by the increase in testosterone from chopping the wood, right?
Tommy: Yeah this is one of my…actually I wrote a piece about this, a paper back when I was blogging on my blog – which I haven’t done in a long time – I mean it’s 2 or 3 years ago now I wrote about this paper where basically I think they compared testosterone levels in a group of hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Amazon and they looked at testosterone levels after either an hour of chopping wood or an hour of playing soccer – or football in the UK. And it was much higher in those chopping wood, so you get out there, chop the wood, you’re outside. You get your sunlight exposure, you get some movement, you get an increase in testosterone and then balance that with a little bit of wood smoke, you’re probably doing okay.
Christopher: And it wasn’t just a small increase in testosterone, it was a 48.6% rise in testosterone an hour after chopping wood. I’m like “I’m all over this, I need to chop more wood.”
Tommy: Well then that’s your answer.
Christopher: So yeah I think my research made me think that everything really depends and really reminded me of what Ellen Langer said about science, which was beautifully illustrated by her story about the horse. So she’s at some sort of event and a man asked her to hold the reins on a horse and says “I’m just going to get my horse a hotdog.” And she’s thinking “That’s crazy, horses are herbivores. Everybody knows that, horses don’t eat meat.” And the man comes back with a hotdog and the horse eats the hotdog. And then suddenly she thinks well of course, it’s so nuanced like what kind of horse? How hungry was the horse and all the rest of it.
And it’s exactly the same with the wood burning stove. Like you can’t say “Oh wood burning stoves are bad”, it really depends like what type of wood are you burning? Is it hard wood, is it soft wood, is it wet wood, is it dry wood? And then of course it depends on the stove, and our stove was over 20 years old. It was poorly maintained, the gasket was leaking, the glass is cracked and all of those things I think are going to make a huge difference. So in the weekend, we went to the store in Santa Cruz – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – but I spent $4000 on a brand new wood burning stove. But it’s so cool.
So to give you an idea of how good the wood burning stoves have gotten now – an open fireplace, it usually emits 100 grams of stuff into the air per hour. And then the type of wood burning stove we had is about 60 grams per hour, if it’s in good working order which ours wasn’t. The new really expensive wood burning stove – the one we’ve got – it emits 1.3 grams of stuff per hour and the burn time is 20 hours. So that means I’m only going to have to open the door every 20 hours and so there’s not going to be a lot of smoke getting into the room.
Tommy: The problem is you’re not going to need to chop as much wood.
Christopher: I know! Yes he did say that but I don’t know. Yeah maybe I’ll just chop some wood and give it to my next-door neighbour, how about that?
Tommy: And then you’re contributing to the greater good at the same time.
Christopher: Yeah exactly, contributing to a cause that’s greater than me, I love it. Like all these solutions that cost no money. Yeah well apart from the $6000, $4000 wood burning stove. But the reason I wanted to bring this up though was I thought it was important that I did the test. Like I would never have known. I always wonder about the people who just wander, meander their way through life and then one day they get diagnosed with something like lung cancer.
My question is could there have been something on a test result that could have alerted you to this problem and then that would have led to you making another decision like maybe getting rid of a wood burning stove completely or something, you know. And doing the test was what made something that was otherwise an abstract concept really, really concrete so that you can make a proper decision.
Tommy: I think that’s one of the real benefits of testing but maybe not one that’s as actively used. A lot of people will like do a test, they’ll see a result. Usually a lot of the tests in this sort of…in our sort of severe come with “Well this is your test result, therefore you need to take these supplements.” And then you spend all this time kind of chasing the test results whereas probably again what’s a lot more useful is for it to help you than be mindful of the things that you need to then fix. So it’s kind of a…it guides you into what you need to focus on rather than necessarily worrying hugely about individual numbers or the supplements to take or anything like that.
[01:00:04]
Tommy: And again, it can become important if you’ve done all the other stuff and you still could be…you haven’t lost the weight that you want to lose or you’re not performing as well as you wanted to do or sexual performance is decreasing, quality performance is decreasing, all that kind of stuff. And then often you’ll fix all the things that we talked about earlier and it still won’t…you still don’t feel like you’re on top form and then you would never have known about the wood burning stove as a potential problem if you hadn’t done the test. So that’s where they become really powerful.
Christopher: And that’s just my stupid story. Of course we’ve done this test for clients and usually, people go looking for stuff in their personal care products like I think is probably being the most common thing when people see that tox result. And you’re sure it was right, that when you get the result back and it’s elevated, it’s not just elevated within that healthy cohort that you selected to create the reference range. It’s multiple times the top end of the reference range, which is what mine was for this toxic metabolite that appears in the urine of cigarette smokers.
And of course I should mention I’m going to redo the test again. So I’m going to live with the new wood burning stove for a while and then I’m going to redo this urine test again, and if the metabolite is still high, I’m going to panic and then I’m going to test my wife and my kid. And if theirs are high, then there’s going to be a wood burning stove listed on eBay and I’m going to [01:01:28] [indiscernible] for forced air or solar or something.
Tommy: I think that’s the right order of things.
Christopher: Okay good. Alright well let’s move on to the stool testing because I think this is another really interesting area that’s rapidly evolving in the testing arena, and we’ve recently started doing the GI map test which is a new PCR DNA test. And I’ve been looking at this test for a while; it was actually a PCR DNA test that I did back in the day – 2014 – and it found a pinworm, which was kind of interesting at the time and I went to the doctor and got a worming medicine and it was the most easiest problem I’ve ever solved. It really, really…the medications in that situation worked really, really well. And it was kind of sad that the lab that did that test MetaMetrics was bought by Genova Diagnostics and they basically destroyed the test. They just bought the company and just did away with it. And then what happened as a result of that was a couple of different companies spun off and started new labs, and one of those is Diagnostic Solutions and their GI map test.
And so I’ve been watching with interest and in February of 2016, I did a doctor’s data stool test and I found a blastocystis hominis infection. And it’s kind of a controversial parasite and I’d highly recommend that people check out blastocystis.net, that belongs to a researcher who is looking at the role of blastocystis in both health and disease which I think is quite interesting. Most functional medicine doctors treat the blastocystis as a pathogen and just to treat it regardless, but it’s one of those [01:03:12] [indiscernible] turning out to be a bit more complicated than that and there may be different soft types and it’s complicated anyway.
I know that it can be a problems so I’ll link to this paper that showed a patient who eradicated a blastocystis hominis infection and they saw relief of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. So it definitely can be a problem. I don’t know, what do you think Tommy? What do you think about blastocystis?
Tommy: I think it’s just as complicated as you say it is because there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it may actually be part of a healthy gut [01:03:49] [indiscernible] or at least it’s not as much of a problem as some people might suggest it is. But often when people come to us and they have symptoms and blastocystis is one of the most obvious things that we find then I think you’ve already selected a patient that’s likely to be having an issue. So then maybe it’s something that’s worth treating but if it was somebody that’s healthy and happy and you did a stool test and you saw blastocystis, it’s probably not something you need to worry about.
Christopher: Right and I wasn’t particularly worried about it back in February. I was feeling really good, I was performing really well, I have certainly no problems with my digestion. But then things started to go downhill a bit I would say over the summer and then definitely there was a marked decline in my digestive health after the BC bike race and I have a feeling that something to do with 700 guys coming from all over the world, living together in close proximity, using chemical toilets maybe – I’m just kind of guessing here but it could be something to do with it.
And I should mention that the GI map test, I did that alongside the traditional stool culture from doctor’s data in February 2016, and it didn’t show the blastocystis and I was quite unimpressed by that and I was thinking “I wonder whether this lab, they are still trying to figure out how this machine works, still trying to get the lights turned on. Do I really want to jump on this right now?” And I decided the answer was no at that time after I did that side by side comparison. I did the test again more recently and the GI map did show the blastocystis. So the doctor’s data also showed blastocystis again, so it’s kind of nice to see that the tests are consistent.
[01:05:33]
Christopher: Perhaps more interesting was that the new PCR DNA test showed a different parasite called cyclospora, which I think is much more interesting and the CDC agrees that it is definitely a pathogen. You certainly either want to treat it or make sure that it’s gone away by its own accord. Do you know anything about cyclospora, Tommy?
Tommy: Only as much as having read about it after you found it, because it wasn’t something that we’d really seen before.
Christopher: No because we wouldn’t. If it’s not going to show up on the test, if the microbiologist is not looking for it, then it may be there but we just would never know.
Tommy: Yeah so this is why…so I mean your story is basically the long way around to saying [01:06:14] [indiscernible] GI map to our arsenal tests and I think because we’re more confident in its accuracy now but also because it’s testing for things our other tests don’t test for and finding them in people who have definite symptoms of something going on where maybe not have found out the issue beforehand. So it gives us a broader scope to find potential pathogens and often when people have some kind of gut health issue as an athlete, there’s often something going on in there. We want to make sure we can find it and treat it.
Christopher: Right absolutely and I was also excited about on the GI map. We see a lot of H. Pylori infections and that’s another one of those bugs where it’s turning out to be a bit more complicated than that and the infection may be protective in some cases, it’s certainly very common. It was listed as a carcinogen back in the day. We know now that not everybody gets ulcers, let alone cancer, from the bacteria. And the GI map includes not just whether or not the bacteria is present but also the amount of growth.
So it quantifies the amount, and then it also measures these 2 toxins which accord virulence factors. And if you’d like to know more about those, I will link to a paper that talks about those virulence factors. So it’s definitely an interesting test and the technology is evolving rapidly and I’m really excited, and I should mention we’re not doing away with the traditional stool culture completely. We’re going to run the traditional stool culture alongside the PCR DNA tests and that seems like about embraces a safe approach to do for now, I think.
Tommy: Yeah absolutely, I think that’s giving us the best of both worlds in terms of the technology and what we’re able to look at and then able to act upon, because there’s no point. I think there’s little point in having data that you can’t then fix, right, because we’re doing stuff to try and find problems that people have so that we can fix it and make them perform better. So with both of those tests together, we could definitely do that.
Christopher: Yeah absolutely and so I’m taking a product called Biocidin at the moment, which I think will do a good job in getting rid of this parasite cyclospora. And of course again, the key is to redo the test and if that doesn’t work, then I’m going to look for another solution to get rid of this bug.
Tommy: Yeah and we tend to work with different herbal supplements because it’s easy for people to access and easy to take and low on side effects, but sometimes if you have a parasite, you just need to go to a doctor and get a prescription and that may be what you need to end up doing.
Christopher: Yeah and we’ve done that several times, and it works right. You go to the doctor and you show them a test that shows that you have Entamoeba histolytica and the doctor is fine about prescribing antibiotics. And again the key is to redo the test and make sure that the treatment worked.
Tommy: Yeah.
Christopher: Okay so if you’re interested in our program, please come to the front page of my website. It’s nourishbalancethrive.com. You’ll find a button there where you can book an appointment and you can talk to one of us for 20 minutes and we can talk to you about how our program might be able to help you meet your health and performance goals. And yeah that’s about it. [00:09:43] [indiscernible] Tommy was there anything else you wanted to say?
Tommy: Yeah, so I think…I guess people have listened to us talk about this sort of very wide ranging number of topics and get to this point now, but I think one…almost sounds like a sales pitch because I guess it is, but one thing that we feel we’re very good at it is sort of the breadth of the number of things that we both actively research and have experience in in terms of both athletic performance but then also health, encompassing all the experiences that we have across the team.
[01:10:17]
Tommy: But also the fact that we or you have this podcast right? So if you work with somebody within the team because you’ll probably spend a lot of time talking with Amelia or Julie or maybe Chris. If they don’t have the answer, then I would certainly hope to have the answer but I don’t always have the answer. And then what we do have is access to one of the largest range of experts on various topics having been interviewed on the podcasts.
So if we don’t know the answer, then we know who to ask and that basically gives you access through us to pretty much anybody depending on what the problem is. So we’re fairly confident and we’ve often spoken to other…worked with other functional medicine practitioners who have expertise in different areas on people who have had ongoing problems and that’s with a large amount of benefit there, so we hope that we can fix pretty much any problem, diagnose whatever’s going on, what’s stopping you performing and help you fix that.
Christopher: Yeah absolutely, I have no qualms. If you turn out to be a difficult case and we can’t fix you, I have no qualms about going to the expert who I think is most likely to have the answer and pay for an hour of their time because I know I’m going to learn something really interesting from that. And it hasn’t come up yet but I would certainly do it and I realize how much value this has when I think back to what I went through when I was trying to solve my own problems. You book an appointment with a doctor and you’d say to the person on reception “Can you order me a 4 thyroid panel?”
And you try to explain to the person on reception what 4 thyroid panel is and they didn’t really know and they would talk to the doctor and they’d get back to you and they’d say “Yeah, yeah we’ll do that, that’s fine.” And then you wait your 3 to 6 weeks for an appointment and you sit down with the doctor, and then it becomes completely obvious that they’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. And this really happened, I sat down with a primary care doctor who clearly had no clue what any of the thyroid hormones were apart from TSH and ended up walking out of her office with a bill for however many hundred dollars and not even getting the test that I wanted.
And it was so frustrating and then having to start the whole process again, trying to find another doctor, “Is this person going to know what they’re doing? Who knows? I’ll find out in 6 weeks.” It’s just so time-consuming and life is too short so I think being able to go to one person and know that you’re going to get fixed is really, really valuable.
Tommy: Yeah and hopefully sort of learn enough in the process. We always aim to teach people as they go so that when you are fixed, you are then able to keep yourself fixed going into the future.
Christopher: Absolutely. Well this has been great, really, really fun. Don’t forget, you got to come and see us in Breckenridge for the Low Carb Conference. Look for the link in the show notes and then Bryan Walsh’s blood chemistry on the 11th and 12th of March in Denver, and hopefully I’ll see you then. Okay, thanks very much Tommy.
Tommy: Yeah cheers fine.
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