The Effect of Stress, Sleep and Food Sensitivities on Gut Barrier Function with Reed Davis, HHP, CNT

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Reed Davis, board-certified holistic health practitioner and certified nutritional therapist. Reed is an expert in functional lab testing and holistic lifestyle medicine. He's the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, FDN, and the FDN certification course with over 4,000 graduates in 50 countries. Reid served as the health director at a wellness center in Southern California for over 10 years, and with over 10,000 clients, is known as one of the most experienced clinicians in his field. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. If you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet called Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic acids testing when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now on to the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Reed. Well, thanks for having me, Lindsey Parsons. Great to be here.

It's my pleasure. So why don't we start with what is functional diagnostic nutrition?

Well, it's a name I gave something I had been doing for 10 years. When I first started teaching again, after spending 10 years in a clinic, I put a course together finally by popular demand and I had to call it something. So I just dreamed it up. Functional. It's very functional. It's all, all about how we function. We use a lot of lab testing for function, how are things working, et cetera. And then diagnostic in nature, but never medical diagnosis. So that's a bit weird, but functional and diagnostic in nature. 'Cause we're using data, we're, we're running lab work. And then nutrition, because I was a nutritionist, nutritional therapist, and nutrition is included in our protocols, although it's not all of our protocols. So it's more like nurturing, but that would've sounded even weirder.

Okay. But the program is called Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and people can get certified in that.

Yeah, we're popularly known as FDN. Mm-hmm. And, uh, there's a lot of FDNers, FDN practitioners really all over the world now. And Again, I started teaching in 2008 and just needed a name and now we're stuck with it.

Mm-hmm. And is this in addition to studying something else, then people add on this certification, or is this the entire course? Can you do this course?

That's a good question. So most of the graduates, and it takes 10 months, I can teach you what I learned in 10 years. Mm-hmm. Took me 10 years to learn in about 10 months. You, it's self-paced, so you could do less, but you know, anyone could do it. And it's the kind of thing that most people do have a college degree, but not all. And you don't have to, some have a certificate or 2 or 3 or 4 in something, whether it's nutrition or personal fitness or, and, and the things that would go along with those certifications, people get more. And then this is kind of the coup d'état, you know, it's, it's the, it's an upleveling in every way.

Great. That sounds like a cool program. So we talked about maybe talking a little bit about stress and how stress can start the downward spiral of health that often terminates in about health issues. Can you talk a bit about that?

Sure. And you know, it's very popular and common to say all disease begins in the gut. I think even Hippocrates, Muhammad, you know, a lot of people said that, but I found that it actually begins with some stressor, some possibly well-hidden stressor, possibly a stressor that doesn't exist anymore, but it has started this downward spiral that circles around to the gut so often that that's why we think disease begins in the gut. But I can show you on paper, you know, with the lab tests, how stress in its various forms, love to talk about that if you want, stress in its various forms causes breakdown, causes what we consider a catabolic condition. So it throws us outta balance and the body starts to break down. And I can show you progression, various of these downward spirals, again on paper with the lab testing. And, and it does circle around the gut, you know, the, the immune system and digestion and things like that. So we get a lot of symptoms and disease processes ongoing in that area. But when we get out of balance from catabolic, anabolic to, to mostly catabolic, then that's when the body starts to break down.

And can you dig more into the actual details biochemically of what's going on?

Yeah. Well, for 25 years I've been using, we just call it a stress and hormone panel. Because it looks at the major stress hormones, cortisol and DHEA. And these are both made in the adrenal glands and they counterpose each other. They, one, one is a kind of a, a counterbalancer to the other. Well, you need both. So your body's supposed to break down and rebuild. That's how we get rid of old cells and get new ones. So there's catabolism, which breaks down, that's measured by cortisol. So if your cortisol's elevated, you may be in a catabolic state unless you have enough DHEA, which again is counter-regulatory, which will be building you up. So you're breaking down, building up, breaking down, building up. And so it's cortisol and DHEA. When we see those out of balance, and especially in cortisol dominance, well, we know that you're breaking down. And guess what? The people who come to us for testing, feel like they're breaking down. And so it totally correlates. We call that clinical correlation. And it's very, very important in our world, Lindsey Parsons, never to treat the paper. It's not about the paper. That just tells us something about a person, and it's about that person. And so from there, there's lots of downward spirals that can occur. One that's obvious, and it, by the way, we measure on the same test, which is saliva, which is done at home in the convenience and safety. And, you know, it's not expensive and things like that. A lot of what we try to use are self-tests. So this easy to use, not expensive saliva test gives us that catabolic to anabolic, but also it'll show us the sex hormones, the progesterone and estrogen, of course the testosterone and so on. You can break it down as far as you want, but but those 3 alone are pretty good markers and they're out of balance in many, many cases. And guess what? Very high clinical correlation with how people are feeling. So finally, from a test result, people find that instead of a typical, say, standard medical blood work, oh, nothing's wrong with you, or your blood work looks normal, we actually see these subtle changes. In the saliva, which is a bioavailable, uh, marker or analyte that we use to, and it's, we do it on every single person. And from there you get into the other tests. There's urine and there's stool and there's fingerstick blood testing for all kinds of other functions that we would consider downstream from those, that kind of a measurement of stress.

So I have a question that I've been curious about for a while. I have done these tests, saliva cortisol. You get the 4 spits. It's like what, 9, 12, 3, and yeah, something like that. Anyway, so there's 4, 4 spits and then the DHEAS. And what I'm wondering about is what kind of test retest reliability is there? Like if we did that the next day, are we gonna find the same thing? Or what if they just happen to have a stressful day that evening and then their cortisol was elevated?

Well, there are instructions along with the test to try to mitigate that potential. So, you know, you would take an ordinary day if there is such a thing, not a day when you have a wedding and not a day after you got kicked out of your house, you know, so some godforsaken thing, you know, so you take a typical day and there are patterns that are fairly reliable. But regardless of that consideration that you just mentioned, one day to the next, everything's relative. So we don't measure the tests in a vacuum. We measure them relative to a person. And what was going on that day. So we might see a high afternoon cortisol, for instance. Well, if that's going on every day, it would really tell us something important. Like you're eating something at lunch that you're sensitive to and your body's reacting to it, or whatever. Your blood sugar is low, you're eating the wrong food, you're insulin spiking, crashing your blood sugar, cortisol kicks in to try to raise your blood sugar. These are the things that we know about, cuz again, for 25 years we've been studying the use of these labs clinically. They're not done in a vacuum. And you, you can't say because one person had this, it means the same thing in the next person. You have to go back to the person and get clinical correlation. So while there are some variations, and that's a great consideration, that's a very smart question. The answer is the test results are interpreted relative to that person that day. And I'll say this to summarize. Everything, every client is a study of one. There's no cohorts. There's no line up 10 people and let's see what we find. There's you and your test results. And does it relate? Does it tell us anything about you? And so that's why we use saliva because it's bioavailable in the moment.

So will you typically ask someone to record anything about their day that they do that test? Because like I often send people off to do tests and then they, you know, I don't see them for 6 weeks. So. By the time the test comes around, they don't remember what they did or didn't do that day.

Well, likely you'd want that person to jot down some things. Matter of fact, some of our tests that we do even have journals and they ask you those questions. So yeah, they include a questionnaire. We have our own questionnaires. And so it would be appropriate to do that. It isn't always done. 6 weeks is a long time. We are looking at usually to get all of our labs back about 3 weeks. Sometimes 4, cuz we don't run just one test on anybody that just wouldn't tell you enough.

Mm-hmm. So we talked about then the, the DHEA and the cortisol. So say that gets dysregulated, how does that then lead to gut health issues?

Oh, it's quite interesting how that works. So when you're catabolic, you're likely going to start losing the mucosal barrier. So matter of fact, cortisol suppresses secretory IgA. That is the, the main immunoglobulin. It's the main defense element in the gut. It's very abundant. It's there to protect you. And that layer that we call it the mucosal barrier gets very thin and it loses its ability to fight against those things that we wanted to fight against. And so yeah, you measure that actually on the same lab test. So the secretory IgA is included in our saliva test. These are tests we developed over the years that we ask labs to do for us. Hey, we want the secretory IgA on there. We also want melatonin on there, which is another hormone that comes into play. All these things are in play to some degree or other. Remember, this is really important as usual. We're not looking for medical diagnosis. We think people have had enough of those. And so instead, we wanna find out just what are the healing opportunities What are the opportunities? What can we do together with other clients to improve things? So these are not, they don't reach the threshold of a medical diagnosis. And again, many people have been told, you don't have one, you're not a medical case. And I might add yet.

So what is the name of the test then that you do and who, whose test is it?

So that's, we use Fluids IQ. We just call it the stress and hormone panel.

Fluids IQ.

Yeah. Fluids IQ is the name of the lab. They're outta Canada. They ship their kits everywhere. They have catered to us to some degree with adding markers, adding analytes that I think are very important in, in all my experience.

The Fluids IQ stress and hormone panel. Yep. And does that include sex hormones as well?

Oh yeah. Cortisol, DHEA, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, secretory HGA, and melatonin all on one easy-to-do at-home lab test kit tells us a lot about you. Does it tell us everything we wanna know? No. The idea is to run tests that cover an entire constellation of healing opportunities. Because again, you'll run up to people who, who, oh, I ran a test like that, or I ran a test. Yeah. And you worked in that one thing, but it didn't work because the way stress works is it's multicausal, multifactorial. And these multicausal factors way upstream sometimes, sometimes really far upstream, happened a long time ago. And all of these causal factors are having an effect on each other. And that's not even measurable sometimes, not singly. And so you have to get the whole constellation. So hormones, yeah, for sure. The immune system. Yeah, we talked about SigA, but there are other immune system markers.. And those are on the other tests. So hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, and some other things with that. We want to get as many healing opportunities as possible and sort it all out, give people the things they can do at home, you know, an epigenetic lifestyle program that will make improvements to every cell, tissue, organ, and system in the body. Why single one thing out? We know that certain diagnoses, oh, I found your problem. Yeah, right. You know, you found a problem, you found a marker that's out of place, and you can treat the paper if you want to. The person might even feel better for a little while, but if you don't address all of it, which is our job, then likely those same symptoms will come back. You have to increase dosage on the medications and different things. The symptoms will come back. Or new symptoms will appear. Mm-hmm. And that's just another endless cycle. So we want to end the cycle of trial and error by getting a very comprehensive outlook.

So when you see that decreased secretory IgA, are you approaching that by starting with addressing the adrenals or are you dealing with that directly? How do you, how do you handle that?

Well, our protocols address every cell tissue organ and system at once. And so it just gets swept up in the lifestyle and epigenetic program. But that in particular, if it's low, what does that mean? Well, it means your mucosal barrier likely is worn, worn thin, and you're, you don't have the same immune system you used to. But what if it's high? Aha, different problem, more like a current infection, something it's responding appropriately to some offender. Some overgrowth, bacteria, parasite, something is, and it's actually responding quite appropriately. So high or low tells us different things about that person and indicate a certain course of action where that person could self-treat, we hope, you know, or they, sometimes we send people right back to their physicians, say, hey, your doctor missed this, so let's go see what what that doctor says about it. And if they recommend something, we might concur. Mm-hmm. We might wanna go more natural. Who, who knows? It's all up to the person.

Yeah. So what kinds of other tests then do you like to do with your patients?

To get the entire, or not the entire, but a big picture, all the, the, the constellation. If I showed you two stars and said, what constellation is that? You'd say, I don't know, it depends. Where's the other stars? So we want to get as many as possible so we can actually look, oh look, hormone, immune, digestion, detox. You've got a lot of room for improvement here. We've identified numerous healing opportunities. And now, now we can set forth on a path that would correct all of it. As long as there's no downward spiral that's really contracted, which is where doctors fit into the picture. So they fit in very nicely if the downward spiral is real contracted. If there's time, then we expect your body will heal. It wants to. There's an innate intelligence and we would just play to that. Let's coach up function while we might coach down contributors to what I call metabolic chaos.

So which specific tests do you, do you order? Hey, this is Lindsey here. Just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues, like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. That's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

There's the mucosal barrier assessment, the metabolic wellness panel, and there's a GI map stool test, and there's a food sensitivity test. And along with this Justin Hormone panel, that, that's 5 really good panels. And, you know, it's an investment in the lab work. We can't help with that cost. It just, it does, we work with good labs who have reasonable prices, we think. And no one makes money on lab work, not us. We simply charge you for the interpretation on top of that.

Right. Whose test is the metabolic wellness panel?

So for that, we use Fluids IQ as well, and that's a urine test. So It's got 3 main markers on it. Urinary bile acid sulfates. Uh, it's got 8-OHDT, which is 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine. There's a mouthful. That's why we call it 8-OHDT. Yeah. So, and then indican, which is a really good old test. And when I say indican to some practitioners, they go, wow, I forgot about that test. I, I learned it in school and, and we never run it. Well, you doctors could all run it in their office if they wanted to. It's a simple urine test. I don't know, when I was a kid, we used to give the doctor some urine and they'd do in, in-office testing. And now there's none of that. It's all farmed out, you know? So it's pretty interesting. Well, there's not as much of it as there used to be anyway. So, so, and they don't do indican anymore. That tells you if you're breaking down protein or not through bacterial action. So you don't want to break down and absorb protein, whatever you're eating, the protein needs to be broken down by bacteria. In addition to the pepsin and the hydrochloric acid in the stomach, it's going into the small intestine. You need this bacterial breakdown to get proper absorption of protein. And protein's where you get your amino acids from. And by the way, that's what makes neurotransmitters, you know, or what neurotransmitters are made from. So there's a whole long Again, downward spiral or chain of events lists the symptoms that can occur just from having positive indican, and it's graded, uh, could indicate dysbiosis. You don't have enough good bacteria to get proper digestion. So that's, remember I said hormone, immune, digestion. And by the way, that tells you there's something going on with your immune system too, because now you don't have enough good bacteria. And you have an abundance probably of the, you know, unwanted biomes. And then from there it just goes worse if you don't find it out and do something about it.

Oh, sorry. I was just gonna ask what the name of the immune test was.

Well, the, the secretory IgA is a really good marker. That's in the saliva test. But the, you know, something else. So now you've got a co— you've got a couple markers now with the indicant. Now you add the 8-OH-DG, that's a measurement of oxidative stress. There's lots of things that'll be oxidizing. Lipid peroxides would tell you if you have oxidization of cell membranes, which is never a good thing. Then there's also one that tests urinary bile acids. Now, if those are in excess, you likely have spillover from the liver of the bile acids telling you you've got a congested liver. Aha. Now we're looking at detoxification problems. So you've looked at hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification. And you can, we do it on every person, is a little finger stick. So you just prick your finger and you drip some blood out onto a blotter. You, it dries, you send it into the lab. It's not expensive. And that'll tell us, we look at the, uh, zonulin, we look at histamine and the diamine oxidase or DAO, and the histamine to DAO ratio is very important. So this tells us more about that mucosal barrier. So we're looking at stress, looking at, ooh, that's your immune system sliding down. That's affecting digestion and the liver's getting congested, especially if you have that Hysonian leaky gut kind of a thing. And the mucosal barrier is further breaking down in that your villi are atrophying or the crypts are becoming swollen, things like that. We call it crypt hyperplasia. So you've got an unhealthy situation. Lots and lots of healing opportunities. And that's just 3 simple tests. One saliva, one urine, and one finger stick.

What's the finger stick test called?

Mucosal Barrier Assessment.

Ah, okay. Is that also a Fluids IQ test?

That's Fluids. That's the 3 Fluids tests we use. They're a good foundation to find out what's really wrong so that you can go about fixing it.

Okay. And then there was a GI Map, which I'm well familiar with. And then what was the last one?

It's called the mediator release test or MRT for food sensitivities. Test for 172 foods. So why would you run that? Well, because you'll never heal the gut and reduce, get your stress markers back to normal, which by the way, regulates blood sugar and a lot of things, insulin levels and things. So there's a lot of connectors. We care much more about connecting the dots than the dots. We don't single one or two or three out. And say, oh, here, take this for that and take this for this and take this. No, it requires looking at in concert. It just works. It outperforms every other system. That's why it's so popular. So, so those 3 tests tell you what's wrong. The other 2, the GI Map tells you, well, well, what else is going on inside that gut and microbiome and things. You can find parasites, bacteria, funguses, it even tests for a couple of viruses. And then the, the microbiome itself, the, the balance between certain families of bacteria need to be highly balanced. So the, the dysbiosis you found on the urine test is actually sort of identified further, speciated to some degree with the GI-MAP, which is a stool test. So, so far we haven't go— had to go for a blood draw and get our veins poked and then the, the food sensitivity test, the really good one does require a blood draw, but there's all these drive-by vampires, I mean phlebotomists who do the at-home blood testing. They'll come out and, and help you get the kit done.

Yeah. So I had heard of the MRT and I've never used it with anyone. I'm curious, are you at all concerned if somebody is doing this testing initially that if they have a leaky gut, they're just gonna have everything they eat show up on it?

No, it's really surprising that that's true with certain tests that their IgG or IgA or something might be IgM, you know, it might be elevated to an awful lot of things that aren't really a problem. There's all these cross-reactivity possibilities. These MRST is a completely different form of measurement. So mediated release tests aren't as dependent on that as some of the other tests. That's why we prefer it. There's always green foods. So that's the good ones. There's green, yellow, and red. You avoid the yellows and reds, but we try to get our clients to focus more. Look at all the green lists.

Mm-hmm.

There's green vegetables, there's green fruits, there's green other forms of produce, and even measures condiments and spices and things. And it's really valuable. I've seen people completely turn around, and I would attribute a lot of it to that one test. I mean, talking about almost miracle. I won't, can't use the word cure and don't want to, but turnarounds. Kids, oh my goodness, so much. And by the way, you, these things can change a bit. And as your gut heals, you may have a few less sensitivities to answer your question a bit. And I've tested people who were on immune suppressants, you know, the, for joint and skin and, and other problems. And they, it, it will throw the test off. Certain tests, it'll, it'll look like you don't have a lot of sensitivities cuz your immune system's being suppressed. So we, that's another reason we like the MRT. It's not as, as affected by those kind of medications.

I think one of the things, maybe my hesitancy in, in ever using it was that it was, I think it was pretty expensive compared to some of the other ones, which I also don't use the IgG tests. But also that I think you have to go through a dietitian or somebody who's—

It's expensive if you go the retail route, but the, the lab fee for a practitioner is actually, I think, reasonable. You know, I always say to people, if you think getting well is expensive, try staying sick with that. Because the loss of work and the, the unhappiness, having no joy in one's life to me is way too much of a price to pay.

Yeah, yeah. No, I often say this to my parents who I test and advise yearly on what to do and not to do as they're in their early 80s. And I keep getting pushback because they're so used to the regular medical model that they followed their entire life, especially from my father. And he's like, I'm not taking more than 7 pills at any one meal, you know? And it's like, well then, okay, okay, then how about stop smoking a cigar a day and drinking 3 drinks a day, right? You know, there's you might have to pay sticks and pills to make up for the lifestyle habits you're insisting on continuing.

I'm with you 100%. I used to work with my parents. My father passed away at 85, but my mom is 93, still living. Wow. And I say, well, she's the one that listened to me most.

Well, that's what I say. I say, you know, how much is a year of your life worth? And it's amazing though, you will get it. You'll still get pushback. Like, well, if I have to live like this, it's not— I'm like, really? Really, like swallowing 2 swallows full, like, cuz he can toss down 4 or 5 pills at once. Like 2 handfuls of pills is not worth a year of your life.

It's, yeah. And, and, um, you know, if you eat really good food, then the supplements can really supercharge the, the process, the healing process and the maintenance. You know, there's just not enough nutrition in food anymore. The food is grown. In depleted soils. So you're not getting, you need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, antioxidants, phytonutrients, trace elements, and whatever else is in there. That's a mouthful there. It's not in the food. So you can only supplement. You get all that. And by the way, if you've done the lab work, you have a much better idea of what would be helpful.

Right, right. Of course. Now I've heard that said a lot. I mean, I listen to all sorts of health podcasts and And I have a little bit of a pushback in my head, which is okay, but what if you're buying the best quality organic foods? Is the soil depleted there too? Aren't they composting? Aren't they doing what you're supposed to do?

It's hard to figure if you know the farmer, you know, that's one thing. But the reason we buy organic food in the grocery store is mostly to avoid the herbicides and pesticides and the bad things. So if for no other reason, buying organic you're avoiding the chemicals. And that alone is worth paying the extra to buy organic. But are you getting much more nutrition? It's pretty hard to say because we don't know who the farmers really are. We know that they, they can't use the poisons and that's a good thing. But is it enough? I don't think so. I mean, I eat organic. It just, every time, I mean, my wife and I are very meticulous. We'll not eat the food if we think it has poison on it. But also even you can take that to a step further, like seed oils and things. We have a problem with labeling sometimes on some of our products, especially in restaurants. You can't figure out what they're using to cook with and things that are not very good for you. So can I give your listeners a tip? It's a really easy one. It's an app. I have it on my phone right here. Mm-hmm. It's called Seed Oil Scout. Seed Oil Scout, or SOS. It's in the App Store. There's a free version, and it will tell you, you can punch in your favorite restaurant and it will grade it in terms of seed oil. Why do you care about that? Because we're eating way too much omega-6 in this country versus the omega-3s. Mm-hmm. And this 3, 6 to 3 ratio is critical for long-term longevity. You know, it's not gonna show up tomorrow or the next day or even this year, but year after year you start getting the cardiovascular disease and other problems. So that along with some other long-term markers on top of what I just told you about the, the more immediate need healing opportunity markers are very critical. In our world.

Yeah. So, so talk a little bit about omega-6s. So, you know, I, I run on a lot of people metabolomics or Nutravalves, and so I see their omega-3s and their omega-6s, and I've, I've noticed this phenomenon over and over where at some point they went on omega-3s, maybe, or, or maybe I see that they're short on omega-3s and I, I suggest that that might be a, a supplement they, they try. And so they do that for a bit, then they take the test. And then I see the omega-3s are way high and now the omega-6s have gotten pushed down because they're trying to do everything perfectly. They're staying away from those seed oils. They're eating nothing but, you know, extra virgin olive oil and eating avocados or maybe avocado oil. And then all of a sudden their omega-6s have tanked. So what's the balance? What's the, what's the perfect ratio for the person who's just trying to eat healthy, who's not like severely impacted? Like what is the right balance?

Yeah, the right balance would be less than 4 to 1, a ratio of omega-6 to 3. So these are fatty acids that are essential. You have to have them. They're polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs. And the ratio, again, you just take the, the 6 and divide by the 3 and that's your ratio. So if you had a 4 to 1 or 3 to 1 ratio of 6 to 3, you'd be in good shape. People in America walk around 10, 20, 30 to 1 ratios. This is not good. They say the Western diet's approximately 15 to 1, and we have seen much worse because of the processed food, which are rich in these vegetable and seed oils. And so testing that can lower your risk for a lot of chronic diseases, but very high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, even cancer. All kinds of inflammatory and autoimmune things. You can reduce your omega-6s by eating less seed oil. And, but you can't avoid 'em completely cuz they are in food, right?

They're in meat.

So you gotta increase your omega-3s and you could do that through fish, seafood, or supplementation. I think everyone, and I, I take 2 capsules every single morning, little, little pearls, and I just wanna make sure my omega-3s are up there.

So I, I like the Nordic Naturals Pro Omega 2000. So each one is basically 1,000 of EPA and DHA in one pill. Pretty, pretty well balanced. And I find though, if people are on 2 of those a day, then they're gonna, then their omega-6s start getting pushed on. And, and mind you, these are not people who are eating a lot of processed food, like the kind, by the time they find me, these people are already on almost the perfect diet. Most of the people I see, they're already eating all unprocessed food. They're not. You know, if they're going to restaurants, it's probably higher quality restaurants or not often. So, so they're not eating the processed food, the standard American diet. So I'm kind of trying to figure out what's the, and then I'm telling them, okay, you know, if I first see them, I say, yeah, so avoid these seed oils. But then it gets to the point where I'm thinking they actually need some more omega-6s. So, so it's like, well, should you cook with canola oil every fourth day? Or, you know, what's the, what's the balance? When I have clients dealing with diarrhea or loose stool, I always tell them about Tributrin. Which is the best absorbed form of butyrate, which is normally made by bacteria fermenting fiber in your colon. Supplemental tributyrin can help slow your motility down and feed the cells lining your colon, firming up stool and helping create an oxygen-free environment in the colon, which helps the butyrate-producing bacteria to survive and multiply. Those bacteria are often wiped out after taking antibiotics, which is why tributyrin is a great accompaniment and follow-up supplement if you have to take antibiotics. My new supplement, Tributrin Max, has 750 milligrams of tributrin, which is the highest dose currently available in a capsule. You can find it at tributrinmax.com. That's T-R-I-B-U-T-Y-R-I-N-M-A-X.com. And use code INTRO15 for 15% off your first order.

You can get tested. We don't guess, we test, right? So there's a good place if you're having trouble. It's called sunbasket.com, and anyone can go to sunbasket.com, and they ship you the food in little bags. You make it yourself. Meals can take 20 minutes or up to half an hour because you still, you know, if it comes with an onion, you still have to chop it. But it's everything in balance, and it's all fresh, and it's all organic, and it's all pretty balanced in terms of these no, no cheap seed oils and things like that. That, and these things go rancid, by the way, and they're just very good. So they're paleo. You can also get the vegetarian. It's all gluten-free, keto-friendly, Mediterranean-friendly. You can get the pescatarian version and only eat fish if you want. Personally, I like a full broad spectrum of foods and it's all fresh. Mm-hmm. So you can get it down to about $5 a serving. If you, if you work with it. Yeah. So if you're cooking for a family of 4, you can have really good meals. You have to order this stuff. Remember, it comes fresh, not frozen. So, but they ship it right to your door. You can get 2 or 3 days worth, 4 days worth, 5 days. You can cook it all at once. And of course, cooked food lasts a lot longer in the fridge. Cool.

I hadn't heard of that one.

Yeah, your kids can be pulling it out of the fridge and your little containers. We use glass. It's got plastic top, but it's a glass and you can pop that right in your little micro. We don't use microwave in our house, but we put it in the, you know, the little oven thingy.

Do they recollect those glass containers from you or?

No, no, it comes in bags. Oh, okay. What I'm saying is we, Oh, you reheat it in glass. Preparing 2 or 3 days in a row. You know, say on Sunday you cook Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday's meal and you put them in glass and you put them in the fridge. Then you could pull them out. The kids could, if you've pre-prepared it, come home from school and eat really good nutritious food.

Yes.

Instead of whatever else they might be wanting to eat.

Yeah.

You can teach them.

Okay.

And plus, they can participate in the making of food. It's actually pretty meditative, you know, it's good for you. Feel like you accomplished something.

Oh yeah, I've taught my children how to cook. My youngest was making meals for the whole family by, I think, 13 or 14, he would do one meal a week.

Wonderful. Yep.

Yeah.

You just need to have 7 kids so then you never have to cook, you know, make—

Right.

Well, Monday, you got Tuesday, you got Wednesday.

We had it down to a science for a while. We had 4 meals, each of us did one meal a week, and then, you know, we were go out probably once a week and then leftovers and maybe at a friend's or something. So it worked out.

Yeah. Yeah. I know we eat out a little bit more often, but not much.

Yeah. So if somebody does have a compromised mucosal barrier from which you can tell, what kind of supplements or approaches would you recommend?

Yeah, so we, we have what we call our DRESS, D-R-E-S-S. Dress for Health Success System. Matter of fact, I think we could give all your listeners a free booklet on the Dress for Health Success System if they want. I'll give you a URL that you can include in your show notes. Right. DRESS stands for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation. DRESS. So if you eat right, the right diet for your type, we have a way of figuring that out. Diet. And you rest, you know, not just sleep, but get during the day if you need, you know, rest your emotions, your mind, whatever you need to do. We teach you some techniques for midday, whatever. You know, in Italy, they do siestas because it's good for your soul, not just because you got up too early. And so diet, rest, and exercise goes without saying. And then the two S's are stress reduction and supplementation. Stress reduction is too big to go into now. I'd love to spend a whole show on it sometime because it's so ubiquitous. There's so many different kinds of stress. And your body doesn't care what kind of stress. It responds with the stress response, whether it was a mental, emotional, psycho-spiritual, whether it was bad food or punch in the face or a car accident or these chemical stressors like new furniture or something. So you get all these stressors and you got to handle them, learn about them, how to sort them out. So you got diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction. Finally, then supplements would actually have a good chance of helping you when you're doing other things right. If you're trying to supplement your way to health, it's not going to work. If you try to supplement your way out of a bad habit, in other words, well, Yeah, I like to eat gluten even though I'm allergic to it, but I'm gonna take my Glutonise supplement. That doesn't work. So supplements are applied intelligently for the nutritional needs, but also to support for maybe a short period of time, certain systems or organs, or to stimulate. You know, like if you're going on a trip, take some immune support with you because you're gonna get exposed to bacteria your, your body might be a little sensitive to. So you can, you can substitute for what's not in food anymore. You can stimulate like the immune system. You can support your adrenals or your digestive system. And you can even self-treat with, they're not really supplements, but they're available in the same store as self-treatment for parasites or bacteria or fungus or these kind of things. So There's 4 reasons to take supplements.

Mm-hmm. And so supplements for a leaky gut?

Oh yeah, that. So we want to coach up function. So the gut needs a lot of circulation. It needs some immune support. It needs some soothing and things. So we want to, we want to support up the proper function. So there's all kinds of ingredients for that. Well, I use a product from Biomatrix called Support Mucosa. What a name. Think of that. And it soothes and helps the healing process. But you also need something to maybe coach down the bugs and biosis and the, uh, biofilms that might occur. So it just depends what we see in the test result. So coach up function, coach down the contributors to metabolic chaos, and you'd be in pretty good shape. With anything that you're looking at, we don't like the word treatment. We like to say support of all, you know, coach up function. When it comes to the gut, you gotta run that test and get rid of the bad foods. They're irritating.

Mm-hmm.

So you, you, if you're gonna keep eating the same way, your supplements aren't gonna be as effective.

Mm-hmm.

Your diet is really a key there. And so is exercise or reduce exercise. You know, people exercise too much. Believe it or not. And so there's lots of ways to look at DRSS regardless of what the main complaint is, like leaky gut or irritable bowel or migraines or psoriasis or ADD in kids. I had a kid once, I'll just tell you this quick story, Lindsey. So working with the lady coming in the office and she says, Reed, I'm just curious, do you work with children? I raised 4 kids. I been coaching football for 15 years. Yeah, I work with kids. She goes, no, I mean, my, they're trying to send my kid home from school if I don't put him on drugs. They say, back then it was Ritalin was the drug of choice for bad behavior. And this kid was poking the other kids and disrupting the class. And hey, put this kid on drugs. The first thing I said really was, well, was this a medical person at the school? Nurse, at least, no, just the teachers and principal were diagnosing and recommending treatment to a mom, which I thought was pretty not very good. And, but I said, I don't know if I could help her out. Let's run a couple of tests and see. After we got the results, changed some things in the young man's behavior. By this way, this kid was 9. They wanted to drug a 9-year-old and the parents were about to do it. That's the thing is that, well, what do you do? So, you know, they're desperate. And within 3 weeks, I'm telling you, within 3 weeks, I got a call. The principal of the school tracked me down and said, you know, Mr. Davis tracked you down with the, through the mom. This is a different kid. He's paying attention. He's not poking around the other kids. He's not disrupting classes. He's actually paying attention. And then he said, what'd you put him on? You know, I thought, oh God, we, we're not getting anywhere with this guy. He just wanted to know what's the magic pill.

And what, what, what, what were the big movers for him?

The big movers were the foods, the food color. He said it, these, some of these foods and the food colorings and the sugar and all the crap, the chemicals and preservatives were neurotoxins to this boy, exciting his nervous system. And he couldn't come out of sympathetic dominant, for one thing. He also had other irritate— again, the nervous system acts where there's probably some inflammation and things going on and some gut issues and stuff like that. We also got him going to bed on time, you know, some disciplinary things. But in 3 weeks, I got a call. What did you put him on?

Yeah.

I said, well, we put him on a better lifestyle. And he didn't want, you know, well, that doesn't— didn't want to hear about that.

Yeah. Well, you'll, you'll love what this, what I used to do my previous job. I started a nonprofit in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of DC in one of the largest and most prestigious school systems in the country to, in order to change the school food. It was called Real Food for Kids Montgomery. And we got them to remove all the artificial colors from the school food.

My goodness. Yeah. Well, good for you. And that is a, that is a step in the right direction for sure. Hopefully they got rid of the sugar too.

Oh, I tried so hard on the sugar, let me tell you. But until the, until the USDA or, or the FDA, well, until they, until they changed the labels, which they finally did, now they show the added sugar on labels. That was a key mover because you have to be able to somehow actually track what's added, what's natural, naturally occurring sugars in order to then say, okay, we want you to limit, but What was happening was if you added it all up, the kids were getting something like 10 teaspoons of sugar in a typical school breakfast. So like on, on a, on a bad day, a day maybe where they served, of course they served juice, but it had to be all natural juice. So, so naturally occurring sugars there, but they would serve, you know, of course the flavored milks with added sugar, chocolate and strawberry typically, and then a cinnamon roll. And then a pack of Craisins that by itself had 5¼ teaspoons of added sugar. So that combo, and so they'd already had more than the maximum recommended daily allowance of sugar in their school breakfast already.

You know, as, as long, I, I totally get it and you're doing fantastic work. And just another quick one. I had a patient coming in our office who was a principal of 5 Montessori schools. So 5 little private schools for Lucas. And she went one to one each day of the week. And she started sitting in on the disciplinary meetings between parent, teacher, and kid. And she just started asking one question of the kid. And the question was, what did you have for breakfast? These were disciplinary, like bad kid, you know, kids doing this or that or whatever, call the parents in. Try to correct the behavior. And what do you have for breakfast? What percentage do you think was sugary cereal?

Oh, probably 95%.

100%. Okay. They're eating Pop-Tarts or Cocoa Puffs or, you know, whatever the heck they're eating today. I don't know, but it's bad. And actually that was 20 years ago. So this doesn't, isn't going away, this problem. And if you ask my 93-year-old mom, what's your secret to longevity? She goes, no sugar. Yeah.

Good for her. I can't get my parents to, to listen to that one.

Well, she says that, but then I see a box of chocolates in the freezer, you know.

Hopefully it's 70% at least.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She knows about that, Coach. She still drives, for gosh sakes. Yeah. Yeah. She's funny.

Okay. One more, one more gut health question. So do you, do you take an, an antimicrobial approach or something more conservative when it comes to things like SIBO or EMO?

It's just blown up dysbiosis. And, and there's questions about the source. How'd you get it? But it's not a test where there's any kind of speciation whatsoever. They don't know which, what the bugs are. Just, oh, you have bugs, you know, bacterial overgrowth. So I think it's really important to dive a little deeper. And you can self-treat. You can remember what I say, coach up function while you coach down the contributors to metabolic chaos. So like overgrowth, bacterial, fungal, or, you know, parasitic and these things. Biofilms occur, they develop over time where they all kind of get together in a big orgy and move up and down around inside your small intestines. And they also produce toxins, the lipopolysaccharides, you know. So they're toxic. And so you have a lot going on. And so to say what's the, one remedy. No, but coaching down bugs, we call them generally, is a good thing. Chase away the bad guys while you support the element, you know, the good things in there. Mucosal barrier, the structure and condition of the villi in between the little villi, the crypts they're called. And there are tests that can tell you how those things are going before, during, after treatment. And as I said, if you're not eliminating the food sensitivities, you're missing out on a big opportunity for improvement.

Mm-hmm. So tell people where they can find you and find the program.

Yeah, sure. So, well, you know that what we do is called FDN, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. And so we have a website, functional, it's fdntraining.com. Mm-hmm. So if you go to fdntraining.com slash The Perfect Stool, that's named after your program, then you would, I think, get a free booklet. Okay. So it's fdntraining.com/theperfectstool.

Great.

And if they don't give you a free book, hopefully they give you something else. Okay. We want everyone to learn about the Dress for Health Success program. Simple Steps for Health Success. Yeah. So that's, that's, you can you can get that book, download it for free if you go to that, go to that URL we just gave out.

Okay. And what about you? Do you practice virtually or are you in a one set location?

No, I have a few hundred people I've trained to refer to, so I do that mostly and don't see anyone one-to-one anymore. Although if someone got ahold of me, I'd give them my best shot. The problem is that without the labs, there isn't much to talk about from my point of view. Yeah, there's just not much to say.

So if they want to find an FDN practitioner, where would they, would they go to that fdntraining.com or something?

We're about to add a list, but if they go to that URL and just sign up for the free book and then follow up to that email, hit reply and say, hey, I'm, I'm really interested in, in hiring an FDN in my area. And really, we're in 50 countries, we're in every state. And at least every time zone, plenty of people to choose from.

Great.

And they'll actually try to hook you up with someone who's work, you know, so we have FDNs who are personal trainers, say young men, 25 to 35, who work in a gym and they help people get more fit and, you know, improve performance. That might not be the same FDN that a postmenopausal woman with, with weight gain and fatigue an irritable bowel, you don't wanna talk to. So there's, you will pick, help you pick somebody.

Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. Good to be here, Lindsey Parsons. And if anything, anything I can do for you, let me know. We're always willing to come back and talk some more.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Well, that was a really good reminder of how important lifestyle factors are in healing. So if you're ignoring your sleep issues or your stress, that may be where you need to focus first before directly tackling your gut health issues. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can buy supplements at a discount from my FullScript dispensary, order tests at a discount from, from my Rupa Health Lab store, or use my affiliate links to eVitamins, which I've learned is available in many different countries. So just click the language button at the top of the page to select your country after following my link, and also on BulkSupplements or Amazon. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, as well as follow me on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. I'm just wishing you all the perfect stool.