Podcast

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission and wisdom with you. Together we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Hello everyone. I'm thrilled today to be talking to Dr. Sam Shea, D.C. and he's certified at the Institute of Functional Medicine. And a side note, he's also a comedian and somehow that's going to get woven in here, I'm not quite sure how. Jen Payer here. Excited to have her today. Thank you so much for, for joining.

Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. I love being on podcasts and, and helping empower people through information. The podcast world has really given so much power back to the, the general public because now that you have people who are, you know, ex domain experts that are just so accessible at scale and very easily and it's, it's a, it's a wonderful age to be in.

Yes, I totally agree and I, you know, I love the fact that more information is readily available to the general public to find root causes of issues and things like that. So tell me, I do want to ask you about this comedian thing because I find it very to be functional medicine which is looking at root cause chiropractor also very astute.

Technically. I haven't been in physical practice adjusting for about eight years. I switched 100% to functional medicine about eight years ago. And the, the way. And definitely bring up the comedy stuff because it is all interwoven and the people are not clear. People want to another definition of, of what functional medicine is. It's, I say it's, it's the, the best of western medicine. Diagnostic technology meets the best of natural medicine. Lifestyle, diet, nutritional interventions.

Okay.

And so we've got, we've got the machines that go Bing over here and that's a Monty Python reference for those of you that missed that. We can get the data from the western science and these are more advanced tests. And I'll be covering today the five main categories of functional testing like hormones, gut, mitochondria, the weird stuff in genetics. And then name approximately three main tests under each category and then name multiple companies that provide these tests so that if, if anyone listening to this wants to gather more tools and be more personally empowered to take control of their health and the direction of, of their lifespan, you'll know the broad categories of functional tests, you'll know some of the specific tests and you'll have heard at least the names of the legitimate companies that are out there. So if you do decide to work with a practitioner, you'll, you'll recognize and be able to ask about these tests in a much more informed, educated way. So my, my journey with, with function with natural medicine and humor actually began as a child and my, I had a very rough go when growing up because I had multiple chronic issues like crippling insomnia, really bad digestive problems, horrible stress and depression from my parents of a vicious divorce and lots of, lots of bullying and violence at school and gaslighting at home. And I coped with video game addiction and sugar addiction and had a lot of chronic pain from the injuries I sustained and weren't believed from school. And my, I use comedy as a way to try to understand the world. So I, I would watch television sitcoms and comedy shows and Saturday morning cartoons, but mostly I would focus on things like look. And this is in the era before anyone knew any better about, you know, Bill but the Cosby Show, Family Matters. I was self aware enough to know that marriage with children was an ironic display of what not to do. And I say in one of my comedy shows, like trying to understand, trying to understand family dynamics from Married with Children is trying to, is like trying to learn psychology from Beavis and Butthead. So and, and I, I looked at comedy as a way to. I, I understood it was a vector for truth. And I also learned that if I could make the my bullies slash assailants laugh, they would hurt me less. And there's, there's a tremendous power in using, using humor as a way of truth to kind a level of, of credibility and rapport and respect in a room at scale because it's just verbal like sound travels. And I, I've done, I mean in graduate school I would do the talent shows where I would pretend to be Jon Stewart and I would dress in a suit. It wasn't stand up comedy, it was actually sit down comedy. I'd have a suit, I'd have the papers to read and I make a fake news broadcast roasting the entire profession, the school, the president of our school, like, like everything. And then I formally began stand up comedy training and Performance first in 2017. But really when I got started Real Nurse in 2019 and I culminated with a one hour comedy show which is available for free on YouTube called Neuro Spicy Love Life and Comedy on the Spectrum because I have Asperger's syndrome, so. Which also explained why growing up I was, it was so socially difficult and why a Lot of the, the predations of the more aversive personalities, children kind of saw me as their target number one because I, because I, I made the mistake of taking children at their word and believing what they said. And because as Aspies, we expect people to tell the truth like us, so we miss things like insincerity. So I spent, I have a one hour comedy show on what it's like to be on the spectrum. And there's, there's no politics, there's no swearing, there's no body fluid jokes. It's clean observational comedy with narrative consistency and a complete story arc for 60 minutes that was designed to bring people on the spectrum and people and the quote, normies together. And because it's the 60 minutes I wish I had growing up to explain how my brain worked. If I had this 60 minutes 30 years ago, my life would have been completely different. Completely different. And it's, it's. People ask me, like, what age range is it for? I would say it's PG13. Not because there's anything necessarily risque, it's because the topic is a bit heady and children might not really fully appreciate it or understand it. And I encourage it for anyone listening if you are on the spectrum, if you are a parent of a child on the spectrum, if your spouse or family member is on the spectrum, or if you have a parent like I do who's on the spectrum also, the show is really there to bring people together for a collective while still laughing like, I got over 45 star reviews when I performed it when it was recorded live back in June. I'm going to be a featured speaker at the aath, which is the American Academy of Therapeutic Humor in May, same conference that Patch Adams spoke out. I'm going to be the comic for Firefly Autism in Colorado, which is a big organization, does their annual fundraising event and I'm the comic to help raise money. And there's all these organizations out there that help people on the spectrum that did not exist 30, 40 years ago when I needed them. So I, I have a mission to help adults on the spectrum, help parents of children on the spectrum because my parents knew nothing and did not handle it well. Also my father is farther down the spectrum for me. I say I am on the spectrum, but he's the bookend. And, and, and I want to, I also, it may sound interesting, but I, I want to focus on helping the parents. I love coaching adults on the spectrum, coachable teenagers and older, but also the parents of children on the spectrum. Because the parent, if, if the parents usually sacrifice themselves and then can get resentful, like it can get tired, burnt out, resentful or whatever it might be. And if there's no self care for the parents, then the child will suffer automatically. And this happened with my parents. And so the number one way to help a child, guaranteed without any exception I can think of is if the parents take better self care automatically there's better decisions automatically, they're modeling better healthcare for their self care for their child. Automatically everyone is happier. And to me the guaranteed way is to help the parents to improve. Now obviously the child also may need some specific help. Obviously. But parents are usually overlooked and my parents were just an egregious example of that. You know, sleep deprivation, high stress, you know, candy for lunch, you know, just chronic pain that wasn't properly dealt with and you know, someone chronic pain, sleep deprived, hangry is not going to make a decision. Not a good combination, not a very good combination to live under. So, so I have, I have a deep personal story of like why I want to help people on the spectrum, parents of children on the spectrum and also helping like most functional. You've seen this in your, in your, in your practice or in your, in your business. The vast majority of people come to functional medicine are women approximately 30s to 70s. Right. And, and that's just, that's just what it is. And there, there's a, you know, 80 plus percent of my practice is helping that exact demographic. And the, the key thing that I have found to help is, is knowledge. Here are the tools, here are the pathways forward, here is the roadmap that and a structure to which to understand and empower yourself to become more self sufficient with your own health journey. And that's, that to me is the real beauty of natural medicine and functional medicine is that it's an empowerment paradigm, not a disempowerment paradigm of oh, you're sick and broken, take, take this pill, the surgery or whatever and you have to be on it for life because you're permanently broken and only this magic pill in a box can save you. And that the humor brought in because sometimes, you know, not that I recommend sugar, but a spoonful of sugar does make the medicine go down. In this case, sugar is humor, delivering whatever non ideal results in, in a way that's empowering and understandable and relatable.

Yeah. So let's talk about functional medicine and you mentioned the, the tools and the tests that you utilize. Why don't we go into that?

Sure. If people are just listening and don't, don't want to peruse YouTube that I'll. It's not. I, I can describe what's on the screen, no problem. So the, the, the premise, the first thing to focus on is what is, is to get the data. And so I'm going to talk about functional lab testing. Now. There are two major objections I want to address up front around even the subject of doing functional lab testing. One is that it takes a lot of time and two, it's expensive. And so that, that's actually not true. Given enough time meaning over the long tail, it saves you a lot of time over the long term because you're actually doing. Because you've got the results, you know, what actual things you're toxic in, what things you're deficient in and you're not wasting your time chasing. You know, I call it nutritional shiny object syndrome. And you're, you're not led astray by things. Then it saves you money because you can learn. Are you actually absorbing all the nutrients and things you're. You're eating? Like the, the number. I'll just like the number one supplement on the planet without even a close second across in all cases is chewing. It's chewing. Chewing will help you absorb your nutrients of your food. And that is the number one thing people can do right away to absorb more nutrients whether you do supplements or not. And like that. That's just one example. So. But most people don't do that. And even if they do do that, they can have other things going on like checking their gut, checking their absorption, checking their digestion. And then people are giving, giving yourself numbers and metrics to know when you actually need to do a thing and more importantly when you need to stop doing the thing. Thing.

Is there a, is there a magic formula for how many times you should chew your feud. I, I remember years ago it was like you need to chew 30 times.

That will drive you nuts. That will create OCD and schizophrenia. Like it just you sit there and one maybe more. It's going to drive you bonkers. I don't recommend it. So I did find a solution though.

Okay.

Is that for every mouthful you're chewing, you take three conscious slow breaths. Obviously not through the throat because you'll breathe and chug, but through the nose as their tongues up in the back of the throat preventing you from swallowing food as you're breathing. But you chew for three full breaths. That is approximately 30 times anyone can count to three and still can't carry on a conversation. If that's a slow three count. But if you're counting to 30, like, it's gonna be the weirdest dinner conversation ever. So the. That. That's how to do it is three slow breaths. And by the way, that will also engage in the parasympathetics because I have a functional neurology background as well. When you do conscious slow breathing, you engage the vagus nerve and if you. And also the frontal lobes directly, which will then improve parasympathetics and improve digestion automatically.

Perfect. Thank you.

So the. So these are the two objections up front. Time and money. And you save both in spades long term. Then I'm going to cover. What are the five types of lab testing that everyone can be thinking about for empowering themselves? So the five different categories are hormone testing, gut testing, mitochondria, slash brain, slash liver, slash blood testing, the weird stuff, mold, metals and Lyme and toxic chemicals and genetics, which is its entire whole entire discussion on its own. So these are the five categories. Hormones, gut, mitochondria, blood, brains, and then the weird stuff and genetics. Those are the five now under. Now going to hormone. There's three broad categories of hormone testing. Adrenal stress, resilience testing, sex hormones, thyroid. Those are the three biggies. So the adrenal resilience testing is looking at how well you adapt to stress over the course of a day. I do not recommend blood testing for cortisol unless you are trying to find explicit extremes of adrenal failure like Cushing's or Addison's disease. And the reason why is because if you get a blood test, there's several flaws with it. Number one, the blood tests only check for bound and free cortisol together. So they're mixing the different types of cortisol. Number two, you are not going to get an accurate reading because to get a blood cortisol test, it has to be fasting first morning draw. So that means you wake up, you're stressed out, fighting through traffic, having skipped breakfast to walk into a doctor's office where they're coming at you with a white coat and a needle. You're telling me your cortisol is going to be normal? Like that's not a thing. So. So your cortisol is not going to be normal whatsoever. It's only useful for the extremes of pathological cortisol levels. Super high and super low. Otherwise you use saliva testing. This. This technology was developed in the 70s by Harvard because they were trying to get samples in. In distant cultures that were in the jungles and deserts and, and savannas and whatnot. And you can't really preserve stool Bl urine that well with no refrigeration. But saliva is way easier to store and it turns out you can get free cortisol testing in the saliva. So getting your, getting saliva rhythm checked to tell you how well you're adapting and if it's too high, too low or disregulated completely sideways and, and all like, there's all sorts of different combinations of how to help your stress adaptation syndrome. Now there's some people that I've heard the term, quote, adrenal fatigue, which was coined by Dr. Wilson, who I studied with. The term adrenal fatigue is not a scientific term. He coined the term to describe what his patient's experience was. And the term adrenal fatigue has been blackballed in the scientific community literature, but. Well, except for a couple of journals that mentioned it in Europe. But. So there's, there's many people that say it doesn't exist. Okay, fine. But what does exist is the term hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis dysfunction, which are thousands of articles on PubMed. You can put that term in there. And that was, that is the technical description of what Dr. Wilson was talking about. So the lab companies that do this are, for example, Genova, Other Adrenal Cortex Stress profile, Precision Analytical, which is best known for Dutch testing. But they also have an adrenal profile doctor's data. And there's, there's like maybe five other companies that do it as well. Then we go to sex hormone testing. The most popular one these days is called Dush test, which stands for dried urine Total Comprehensive Hormone test. This is a urine, and it could be a urine and saliva test if you combine it with the adrenals. And this checks for the entire metabolic pathway of sex hormones. So it's not just checking for estradiol, it's checking for seven types of estrogen in their order of operation. So like, how well are you converting, you know, DHEA into testosterone or androne? And then is a Testosterone going into E2, is the Andron going into E1? And we look, these are. You can win a Scrabble tournament if you're on a first name basis with these hormones. So don't, don't get lost in the jargon. I'm just like, it's, it's a word salad for sure. But, but the main point is that you can actually watch the entire pathway of the estrogen detox system. So are you detoxing estrogen correctly? Because a lot of women in the, you know, especially in the 40 to 60 age bracket, they're dealing with perimenopause, menopause or postmenopause and their hormones all over the place. And just looking at E2, maybe not so valuable as looking at seven estrogens plus the pathway that got there, plus the progesterone metabolites so you can map out are you detoxing your estrogen incorrectly into the four. Like say again, some jargon coming up. So buckle up. The four hydroxy pathway, which is the bad version of estrogen which you do not want high cuz that creates, creates metastatic events or is it detoxing correctly into the two hydroxy pathway and then is it properly being methylated out? And if it's not, where is the backup? Where's the plug? Each, each of these steps is a different nutritional intervention that looks at the different enzymes and looks at the different, like is, are, is it going into 16? Oh, whatever you can get. Again, it gets pretty complicated, but at least you have a map and you know what you're doing because you actually see the whole map. Melatonin is also on the Dutch test and there's some other companies out there that have their own versions. Genova has their, their competing thing. There's some other companies that do. And then the third thing in hormone testing is thyroid. Thyroid is usually, I don't know if this is your experience talking about. Thyroid is usually the entry level hormone test for women 35 to 70 to like, okay, something's off, do thyroid, you know, and that, that's kind of the first thing that's tested for. And, and I actually got started with functional testing in earnest and I trained in it back like almost 20 years ago. But I really, really got started, started in 2014, over 10 years ago when I saw, I was living in New Zealand at the time and a patient came to me and she had, and I, I had never seen a goiter in my life until I went to New Zealand. But within my first month of practice I saw one and that wasn't the first one. This woman sat in front of me, she had a goiter. She had every single sign of hypothyroidism except maybe one or two, you know, missing the eyebrows, hair loss, tired all the time, achy joints, couldn't lose the weight, like just couldn't control temperature. Like she was cold. And she sat there and said, well I saw my specialist, the endocrinologist, he ran my TSH said it was normal and told me that I was just depressed and I need to take an antidepressant and I don't have hypothyroidism because my special. My endocrinologist ran TSH and said I was normal. Right.

Which is one small piece of the puzzle.

It was one of those few times I had to collect every drop of my diplomacy to not fly into anger, not at her, never at her, but at. At the quote specialist. And I just grit my teeth and I said, I am very sorry this happened to you. I am embarrassed on behalf of all conscientious medical practitioners. But that, that quote specialist did you a disservice because they only tested one thing called TSH. And there's a minimum of six things to check for. So this is TSH, which you should do, but also free T3, free T4, reverse T3, antibodies to thyroglobulin called anti TG, antibodies to thyroperoxidase called anti T. Oh, then you can get a full picture, which is what I did with her and, and then helped her because we now had. She had an autoimmune, she had autoimmunity to her thyroid, but the TSH was not. Was not sufficiently impacted. But clearly there was an autoimmune issue happening. So. So Genova has one, Access Medical has one, ZRT has their own version. So the big picture, kind of the meta message here is you've got medical testing of cortisol, which is one metabolite under high stress, fighting morning traffic while you're hangry with someone coming at you with a needle. Not very accurate, but only useful for pathological extremes. You've got sex hormone testing. In the medical world it's very limited to like one or two metabolites and it's only really useful. It sits in the extremes. And then thyroid in the medical world, it's like TSH only. And maybe if you beg, kick and scream and bang your head on the floor a couple times, they'll take pity on you maybe and give you maybe free T4. But they're missing everything else, which is the TSH is only useful in extreme cases. So what is the pattern? Medical testing is looking for very few metabolites for the extreme pathology presentations. Functional testing is looking at all the gray space in between at many more markers following the pathway to see what is going wrong well before it becomes overt, explicit pathology. Unless they complete. Unless in the thyroid case they completely miss everything and they just latch onto one metabolite.

Do you recommend that the, you know, 35 year old do all three of these tests or is it only when they're experiencing symptoms? Is this something.

So there's, there's ideal and there's ordeal.

Yes.

So, so if they're in the ordeal, then get all of them. The ideal is that functional testing is ideal for, for optimization and, and seeing, seeing around corners before things showing up in unpleasant, before it becomes an ordeal. So, so there's ideal and there's ordeal and there's also the reality of like what are people, where are people living? What is the amount of, what's the amount they're willing to invest in their, in their health? Like is there a specific thing that's showing up soon? Like, like adrenal weight gain is different from thyroid weight gain, which is different from estrogen weight gain. You know, so, so there's, ideally people are working with a practitioner who can help triage what is the highest priority things to do. So, so there is a spectrum from ideal to ordeal. And I think the, the, the primary mindset, the primary thing to do is one, have the mindset of I want to get started in my lab testing journey. When in doubt and you don't know where to start, you can always do a stress test because everyone's got stress of some type. And if you've got, anyone can look up the signs and symptoms of thyroid issues and they can just do a quick checklist of that and they can say maybe start with thyroid. And in general it's not a bad idea to get your hormones tested regardless. So I, I'd say just if, if you, if you weren't sure, just pick one to get started. And, and honestly if you were to pick one test to start with, anything, it's genetics. And, and, and, and I'll talk about that more towards the end. But the reason why is because you just get the results once and you're good and you got those results for life. So, so that the dividends from one test is the highest with genetics with not even a close second. So then second to that, I'd say gut testing would be like the second most viable thing to do because if you're not absorbing your nutrients, then all this other stuff is gonna be hampered at best. Yeah. And then the, then third is, you know, whatever someone's personal situation or goals are. But I would say priority one is genetics. If you just had to throw a dart at a board, it'd be genetics number one, gut number two. And then whatever your situation is, number three was that, is that resonate with you.

That's great.

Yes. So the, the third type of, the second category is gut testing. So we did hormones, adrenal sex, hormones, thyroid. Second main category is gut testing. There's three main tests under gut testing. One is like the big gut tests. So these are things like GI map from Diagnostic Solutions Lab, one of my favorites. Genova's GI effects been around for a long time. Doctors data GI360. There's the classic CDSA comprehensive digestive stool analysis which I think like five companies do and there's a couple others that have come onto the market, but those are the main ones. And the, the, the big gut test is important because it's looking at digestion dozens of different infections. Whether it's, it depends on the test of it. But basically it's like H. Pylori bad bacteria, protozoa, worms, viruses, fungi and then it's looking at normal beneficial bacteria and then digestive functions, pancreas, gallbladder and then inflammation markers and, and gluten immunity. Now I love this test to help people finally get off gluten because hey, you got massive antibodies to gluten, should get off it. But, but the gut, the big gut test is really important to check for. Are, do you have any stowaways in your gut like the hidden infections? Are you, do you have beneficial bacteria digestion markers, inflammation immunity and so on. The second big popular gut test is called sibo, small Intestinal Bacterial overgrowth. And there's some other variations like cfo, small intestinal Fungal overgrowth. Genova has one. Gemelli Tech has like the tree Trismart SIBO test where they're checking for hydrogen, methane and sulfur gas. I would say if you were to pick one, do the big gut test first because SIBO can be a secondary effect of imbalanced gut. And then there's food intolerance testing where you check for like am I reactive to, you know, eggs, soy, nuts, grains, meats, additives, chemicals, whatever. And there's, you know, some of these tests have like eight different immunobodies immune system markers from the, the compliment system to iges to igas, igg, igg 4 igg this igg every, everyone's getting igg igms and my. I actually like these tests the least because if I have like, if this is my forearm and I take my finger and I poke my forearm, my finger just bounces off if the skin is whole. But if I have a cut in my, if I have a cut in my arm and I poke my finger into the Cut. Do I have a finger allergy or do I have an irritated wound that my finger is poking? That's the same thing in the gut. If the gut is irritated, inflamed, infected, damaged or whatever, and broccoli comes by and brushes against that irritated, damaged, infected, or inflamed part of the gut, my gut can only respond with an immune response. But is, do I have a broccoli allergy or do I have immune, have infection, inflammation, damage or, or toxicity or otherwise that part of the tissue is compromised. Why don't we heal and seal up that part of the tissue and not blame the broccoli?

So when would you use this test?

After gut testing. Okay. And now, now it can be done in parallel. But the problems that I find is that if you do food intolerance testing, it can come back one of three ways. One, I'm reactive to everything except like a piece of chicken. And that's a problem because it doesn't make any sense. Like, I can't eat anything that doesn't, like, how could I have anyone to survive if I'm reactive to everything? So that's an overactive immune system. Or they come back and they're reactive to almost nothing, which doesn't match their lived experience of not being able to digest food. So they feel like they wasted their money and the, the test is bogus or you come back. The third is like you got a couple things that do match their experience, a couple things that they didn't realize that you can judiciously remove and it's not the end of the world. But that third scenario is not that common. I would prefer to heal, seal and soothe the gut first. Then if there's still reactives to food, do the food testing afterwards because you're no longer having the finger, the finger allergy, you know, false positive thing going on. So that, that's my stance on food intolerance testing and people disagree with me, and then that's fine. But I, I, I, I think, I think if you're a triage, do the big gut test first. Got it. The next category is, it's kind of the big blood testy stuff, mitochondria, brain, liver testing, basic bloods. And this has to do with the function of how you produce energy and your, your overall nutritional status. So mitochondria testing includes things like checking your amino acids, your fatty acids, your B vitamins, fat soluble vitamins, checking for liver function. Like there, there's, there's all sorts of different, the mitochondria can have I mean I was called in to consult on the nutristat test, which is the most comprehensive mitochondria test. You know, it's out of Australia, it's got over 240 metabolites. And you know, it's, it's so much goes into the mitochondria. The mitochondria people don't know. It's, it's the center of the bullseye where it's a thing that generates the electricity to run your body. If, if your cell is a city like in like say New York or la, if you lost electricity to, to LA or New York, you have three days before it turns into Mad Max. So you need to have the electricity running or everything breaks down and it's bad. So this is, and require the mitochondria is, that powerhouse is the electrical grid and it needs like 50 plus nutrients to run properly and it needs everything around it to work properly also. So when you look at a standard multivitamin, basically every ingredient in there is to help the mitochondria function. That, that's really what a multivitamin is. I know we're not going to get into like what type of multivitamin, what company and what do you need like the details? That's, that's a whole other discussion. But, but you want to test your mitochondria and to see if it's good for brain health. It's, it's, your brain runs on mitochondria. If you got concerns around neurodegeneration, energy, pain levels, headaches, brain fog, um, by the way, the connection between the mitochondria and the thyroid. The mitochondria is the business end of the thyroid. The thyroid sends out T4 which is this little, I call it a little four wheel car that drives in the bloodstream highway, pulls over into the mitochondrial parking lot, does the transformer noise, you know, and then like one door opens and becomes a hand. That's T3. T3 tells is the engineer that tells the mitochondria to dial up, to burn proteins, fats and carbs to create energy. So you can have a situation where someone has all the signs of hypothyroidism and all of their functional thyroid tests, 3T 3VT4, the antibodies teach, all come back normal. But it wasn't a problem with the thyroid. It was a problem because the mitochondria was damaged or broken. Because it's the thigh, the mitochondria is the business end of the thyroid. So you can have people who have perfect thyroid, but have all the signs of hypothyroid. And it's because the mitochondria is damaged, not the thyroid. And very few people have ever discussed this. So the mitochondria is, is, is, is, is, is so critical. And testing it, like there's Genova's, you know, Ion panel, there's a different version called the Neutral Val, there's another version called the Metabolomics Diagnostic Solutions Labs, which makes the GI Map stool test. They have a milder version called the omx. And then there's other companies that are trying to create their competing versions of it. And you don't see a lot of functional practitioners run mitochondria testing because it's very hard to interpret. It's the difference between, like, I taught anatomy nationally for a bit of time after I graduated from graduate school, and I also have a neurology, a heavy neurology background. It's the, the difference between reading a gut test and a mitochondria test is the difference between learning musculoskeletal anatomy and learning neuroanatomy. Like the words in a digestive test actually can match what you're studying in terms of the, the digestion, but the words in a mitochondria test, like, like methylmolinate, like there's no structure. Like that is a, like the, the polysyllabic jargon. And mapping out all the pathways is so much more complicated. It's the jump from basic anatomy to neuroanatomy. And I studied for four years of how to learn and teach this test when I was studying with Dr. Kalish. So you don't see a lot of practitioners do this test, unfortunately. But, but if you do find one that's very skilled, you consider yourself very lucky because this test can be an absolute game changer. The fourth test, the fourth category is all the bad stuff, the weird stuff. Mold metals, lined and mold metals, lime and environmental toxins. These are the things you don't want. But unfortunately, if you have one, usually you have one or more of the other because you get one. The rest come to play. And as, as we're talking right now, Jen, I am sitting in a new place I'm living because this week, as of this recording this Monday, I moved out of my mold infested apartment, which was explaining why my health was taking a dive over the past couple of years. And I, and I did a massive mold, endotoxin and actinobacter test and it came back crazy high. So I am, and I'm saying this even Though it's like, wait, you're a function. You should have known moles. Like. Yeah, well, it happens to the best of us and we can live in as much denial and self deception as possible. No, I don't want to test for mole because that means I may have to move. Well, guess what?

Hear that all the time. All the time. People that live in a house who say, I don't, I don't want to know, I don't want to know, then you can't ever get rid of it if you're living in an environment where you're continually exposed to it. Right?

Yep. And I am, I am exhibit A. I am horribly embarrassed. And honestly, I've been in a grieving process. I've been, it's, it's been really rough to like, realize what I did to myself over these past couple years. But I will swallow my pride and talk publicly about this because I made the very mistake I knew not to make.

So how did you know? How did you know to test for mold?

Well, aside from the brain fog, the massive fatigue, the headaches, which I never get, the, the irritability, the occasional skin rash, the, the, the, the emotional lability, like just, just up and down, like the, the brain, like, just not able to concentrate and like just feeling off and like the 80. My add was just massive. What really put me over the edge was actually my follow up mitochondria test. I did, I did a follow up mitochondria test and I saw that my mitochondria were dying. Wow. And like I was in what's called mitochondrial retraction, which is a, which is a newer term in the literature as of the past 15 or so years. And I was doing great nutrition, like fantastic nutrition. And, and it should have been the opposite. It should have been the opposite according to literally everyone who does mitochondria testing. Everything I was doing was. And my mitochondria had gotten demonstrably, catastrophically. Worse. And I was like, there is no way, there's no way this can happen unless I'm being poisoned or I have some sort of weird infection. It's. There's, there's no other explanation of this. And so then I did the really involved testing of the house and sure enough, it came back super high in mold, Actinobacter, which is a, which is a horrible cousin. It's like the sociopathic cousin of mold and endotoxins. And I was like, okay, that explains it. That explains it. So it was actually the mitochondria test that. Okay, that was like, okay, something is horribly wrong and it's not, it's not what I'm doing. It's something that's poisoning me. So there's, there's multiple mole tests out there. There's mycotox tests from Gay Plains, there's mycotoxins from Vibrant Wellness. I mean that's gonna be part of the total tox test from vibrant America. There's heavy metals, Quicksilver Scientific, it's out of Colorado. They have the best mercury test I know of where they check both urine, hair and blood and have this incredible algorithm to see what type of mercury. Because different, different type of mercury requires different types of detox pathways. There's, there's urine text testing for metals from doctors David and Vibrant Wellness. Some people do, you know, provoked tests where they try to pull more toxins out of the tissues first. Some people don't. It's, it's an ongoing debate. Lime testing, there's like tick borne testing out of Vibrant. Igenics has lots of panels online. But Igenics can be outrageously expensive for, for a lot of people. And so it just depends on lab testing has, lab testing has its own like economics within it. So there, there's, there's different, there's a really good practitioner will help you triage the, the an 8020 principle. What's the 20 of tests that will give you 80% of everything you need to know. And so that's the bad stuff. And then there's genetics, which is one of my specialties. I'm actually a helped onshore genetics company's analysis into the United States. And there's the. I love genetics. Genetics is one of my absolute favorite things. And if you've got, if, if you're interested in genetic. The reason to do genetics is the following. Number one, you can genetically identify your optimal diet. Are you keto, Mediterranean Paleo or high carb? That technology exists. Now. Can you genetically identify hardwired trigger foods? Not like the immunity stuff we discussed before, but genetically hardwired. Like for example, some people are genetically vulnerable to celiac if they should never do gluten, period. End of story, full stop. Some people like me are genetically vulnerable to caffeine where I get quote, caffeine induced anxiety and depression. I don't care how bulletproof you make that coffee. And I've tried, oh I have tried, tried them all. I could put in like I could put in tablespoons of coconut oil, you know, grams of cinnamon. Like I, I had a, I had, I found in my Mood. I found my little coffee card of, like, what my ingredients were. There was like 10 ingredients on there. It was like clove, cardamom, cinnamon, burdock, coffee, coconut milk, coconut oil, turmeric, little bit of salt.

All the good stuff.

All the good stuff. And I was still an anxious, depressed mess. It's like, no, I'm being bulletproof. I'm being bulletproof. See how bulletproof I am? Ccccccc. Like, it was. It was not. My genetics were like, nope, sorry, not gonna happen. It's. You can determine your trigger foods, whether it's histamine intolerance, caffeine, your relationship to metabolizing alcohol, lactose gluten, food allergens. You can learn what your best form of optimal performing exercise is and how well you recover from exercise. And if you need to implement more recovery based on your genetics to learn your eating behaviors. Like, do you over crave sugar? And then also, do you over consume sugar? Those are two separate genes. So people can crave but not need to over consume. These are the people that need one little square of chocolate. I'm done. I hate these people. So annoying.

That's me.

Oh, God, the worst. I'm just like, wanting to crave three chocolate bars. And here you are just like, nibbling on your one little square and seem to be fine, and I'm boiling on the side of the dinner table. Anyway, so then. Then it's your relationship to vitamin D. This one's huge. Your genetic relationship to vitamin D is probably one of the most significant genes you could ever find out. And I'm not talking about synthesis from the sun, which is important, but is actually not the most important thing. It's the vitamin D receptors, meaning it's the docking sites on the cells that grab the vitamin D. That's Flo floating right in the. Floating by in the blood. Like, the blood is just a giant rotating sushi tray. You know, you go to sushi restaurant, they got the things like spin around on the thing. Your blood is like that, and your cells kind of grab the things they need off the sushi tray. And so the. I'm doing terribly with this metaphor, but the VDRs are the chopsticks that grab the vitamin D off the sushi tray. But some people don't have that many chopsticks. And. And these people cannot use vitamin D no matter how much you take in supplements. They use it inefficiently, I should say. And no matter how many supplements or sunlight or food that's high in vitamin D, they have Vitamin D controls up to 5% of your entire genome. That's massive. Massive. And most of it is not about bone density. It's about controlling inflammation and your immunity. So your, your relationship to vitamin D is I, I think one of the top five genes you could ever possibly test. My opinion. Wow. Then you've got your, the, the achieve your natural weight set of genes. Which is most. I've identified three types of genetic based weight gain, weight loss. There's the genetic inflammatory water weight gainers. There's the genetic toxic hormonal weight gainers and then there's the generic caloric fat weight gainers. Now some people can have all three and these people are really stuck with stubborn weight. Now the pe. Most people think it's the genes of burning calories that are the most important for weight normalization. Completely untrue. Absolutely not. It's inflammation, number one. By far, by far. Toxicity is number two. And I'll give you the example, it's inflammation because you, you're gaining a lot of inflammatory water weight. I call puffy weight. So there's a very simple. People are genetically over inflamers. They have a very high risk of what's called puffy weight. And this is a good, I call it, I have the, what's called the, the muffin test. So the muffin test, very scientific. The muffin test is you eat half a muffin and put on one to four pounds in a single day. Now unless that muffin was last year's re gifted Christmas fruitcake, it did not weigh one to four pounds. Right? So by the way, do you know there's such a thing as a, as a fruitcake toss in Colorado. This is an actual event. This is a real thing. This is real, this is, this is the fun thing to google after this podcast. There is a fruitcake toss event in Colorado. Anyway, so, so what does the muffin test mean? It's that the half a muffin did not weigh one to four pounds. But the inflammatory chemicals from the sugar, the dough, the preservatives, the dough conditioners, the chemicals, the colorings, the little plastic wrappy thing, whatever it leached into the, the, the, all of that created inflammatory chemicals in your body. How does that create water weight? Very simple. The solution to pollution is dilution. These inflammatory chemicals will damage your cells and tissues. So the body will throw water into what's called the interstitia inter. In between the cells. It will dilute the toxic chemicals by making all the water between the cells, maybe bringing more water to it. So there's less chance the bad chemicals will hit and damage the cell. This is the water weight, this is the water swelling that people, this is what people can put on one to four. It wasn't calories, it was water that was doing this. And now, at least in the gene tests that I run, I've identified 16 different causes of weight gain underneath the inflammatory 15 separate ones that have to do with like water weight and inflammation. A histamine intolerance is one of the. Histamine is a, is a cousin of inflammation. If people are so Histamine is like. So people get stung by a bee. The bee did not inject a half quart of water into your arm as it swelled up. That's not a thing. What happened is that the bee injected venom or a scorpion or a spider bite or snake bite or certain plants, whatever. Venom is an acute poison that could corrode or erode tissues, nerves, cells, muscle, and in very rare cases, bone. So histamine is the body's emergency flood switch. We're going to drown that area, that area only with lots of water, quickly. And that's what the swelling effect is from a bee sting.

It's a protective mechanism of the body, right?

Correct. But it can be over enthusiastic. So it's a trade off. If you have too much histamine response, you can then cut off circulation. If you have too little histamine response, then that, then that venom will erode and corrode cells and tissues and cause problems. So you have genetic variation of people who have a higher histamine response versus a lower histamine response. And that makes sense as variation because human evolution does not care about you as an individual. It only cares about your lineage, how far your genes can get into the future. So if you create a variation of different types of tolerances in the next generation, one or more of those will survive and then recombine to the next generation. So you'll always have this floating variation of survivability over time, which is the best lineage survival strategy according to human evolution. So this is why you get the genetic variations. And by the way, inflammation is not bad either. Hyper inflamers survived acute flesh wounds from hunting accidents more than people who were lower inflamers because inflammation is to bring blood and red blood cells to repair and white blood cells to fight an infection from a bite wound you got from trying to take down a giant animal with using only a tiny stick. Right. So if I'm more acutely inflammatory prone, I'm going to heal faster than my less inflammatory prone hunting party member at the expense of long term risk to chronic health of being hyper inflammatory, I will have short term survivability. So again, it's all part of that trade off system.

And are there companies that you recommend for the genetic testing?

So the only one that I recommend is being self serving is, is Fitgenes and that's the one that I run and that I'm the, that I work with in the United States and I've created a whole new complete, I solve for a lot of problems as other genetics companies have. So when you run a genetics test with any of these other companies which have good genes. I'm not, I'm not, that's not an issue. It's, it's the implementation and practicality and winnability that's the problem. Because most genetics companies you get either very few genes and you're told this is it, this is all you need. You're amazing, you're perfect. And it's, it's just not true. Gary Breca, who's on Rogan's podcast in 2 Decembers ago, is the most egregious example. You only need these five methylation genes and you're good for life. And I was like screaming into my iPhone, I was so upset and out of solidarity I was like, fine, I'm going to publish three separate podcasts on the methylation pathway and show him, citing my sources, why he's wrong. So that's how I deal with that. If people want the full mogilla on it, you can go onto my YouTube channel and find those three podcasts on methylation where I debunk his thing. Anyway, so you've either got too few genes or you have too many. And they're not prioritized and organized. So you're given 300 health tips with no organization, no prioritization and people are left feeling overwhelmed, confused, intimidated, and ultimately they careen into fatalistic nihilism. Like I'm going to give up. You know, my MNSA gene is red. I'm going to die on Tuesday by what this report says. So might as well just do the complete opposite and just eat candy all day because I'm, because my life is miserable and not worth it because my genes suck. You know, that's, that's, that's what happens with a lot of these other companies is that there's not a, there's not prioritized, they're not organized, they're overwhelming or they're simplistic and there's Not a clear pathway to win. Like, Here is a 12 week implementation pro support program. Here is a complete, you know, library of understanding your gene. Like, I recorded over 200 videos in a resource library. So you want to go deep into inflammatory weight gain. Here's the video, here's the resources. If you want all the technicals of all the different genes and the hexadecimal designations of the RS codes and blah, blah, blah, here's the official reports from the company and it's like a little overwhelming, but here's this separate custom report that is all the things practical to do. Here's the report you print out and you follow. Here are the things to do for your diet, for your exercise, for lifestyle, for like in here's. And it like, yes, here's of all the supplements that you could pick based on your genes, here's the top five in order of priority and why they're the highest priority. And if you want to do more, knock yourself out. Here's the rest in order, listed in order of priority. So like, so it's, it's, it solves for all of this insanity, right? And I'm not knocking, I'm not knocking the genes that are chosen by other companies. Yes, I believe the panel that I'm using is better. But the quality of the science and the genes is great. But that's more data is not better. Better organized data is better, better winnable, practically implemented data is better. And that's where I'm thoroughly biased, that my genetics test is the best because I have seen what's out there and consciously made the corrections to the flaws in those other tests.

Okay, so as we wrap up, this is a lot of information for folks. I know you said you would start with the genetic panel. Where, where would somebody go? Where do they start? Do you meet with people online? How does this work?

So, so for my, so speaking for the whole, whole industry of genetics and in general the way that people work is that they go and they get their genetics panel, they do the cheek swab or whatever other methodology, they send it back to the lab and then they get their results and in their portal and there's usually some support videos and that's just kind of the generic thing. What, what I do is that I have a group coaching program where people go to my website and they can, they can learn about the genetics there and it's, they can get the test, they can get into the 12 week support program and then there's all the back end resource videos and then there's an option to do group coaching as well, where we meet like twice a month and answer questions to the group around genetics and, and have those calls available. So there's, it's also like how do you scale? Because the genetic. How do you scale in a way that, that you can get this information out quickly to everyone. That's practical and winnable and that's through the group coaching model. There are, for functional testing, there are group programs out there depending on the practitioner. But most functional testing is one to one. Yeah, it's, it's, that's basically the field. And so when in the types of functional tests that different practitioners offer, like I have my own preferences of the companies, I've listed them and the way to think about functionality testing is think of it like classical music. You've got different composers. Bach, D, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, whatever. They all have different emphases. How many violins, how many, you know, do you use a tuba or not? What's the percussion section like? It's all classical music but there's different biases and emphases and things that are focused on first, next and last. So you'll have one functional practitioner. It's like 80% of their world is gut. Another one, 80% of it is mold. Another one. It's all mitochondria. And they may seem like they're arguing and, and contradicting each other. But that's like saying Tchaikovsky is, is, is contradicting Mozart. That it's, it's, it's, it's in the same genre but there's a different focus. So that's why I want to explain some of the confusion that people may come across when working with a lab test. Best lab test based functional practitioners is they'll see apparent contradictions and it's kind of not, it's just a different arrangement, if that makes sense. It does.

And folks can find you@drsamshay.com or yeah, doctor yeah.

D R S A M-S-H-A-Y.com I have a free three day lifestyle, lifestyle nutrition guide that people can download and then you'll be on my newsletter. And I've also got a YouTube channel of I don't know how many videos at this point. You can put my name into any podcast, any podcast service and you'll find more of my stuff. And if you want to see my comedy show, you can just go to my YouTube channel and put in Dr. Sam Shea Neurospicy and you'll see the hour. Secondly, it's an hour and three minutes with the credits and whatnot. You can see my comedy there. But the main way to reach out to my team is just through my website, DrSAMShay.com there's a lot of free goodies on there, and you can learn more about the genetics and other things there. Awesome.

Well, this has been very valuable information. Somebody who's done a lot of testing personally and with my clients. This is awesome to love how you shared it and the depth of it. And I love that you provided different companies that that are tested and true in in your opinion. So thank you so much for.

Thank you, Jen.

And everybody will have the in the show notes, your website and how to find you and your videos on YouTube as well.

Thanks, Jen. Thank you.