A Cardiologists Take on Toxins, Heart Disease, and Therapeutic Plasma Exchange

Today's guest told me he's probably one of 5 or 10 cardiologists in the entire country who would say what he's about to say. Dr. Christopher Davis, triple board certified, over 50,000 patients, started running environmental toxin tests on every single person who walks through his door. And what he's found actually blew his mind. Toxins literally bound to DNA, which drive heart disease, autoimmune conditions, and even neurological diseases. And the kicker is that he actually found one of the biggest culprits sitting on his own kitchen counter. So you're definitely gonna want to hear this. Let's dive in. All right, Dr. Christopher Davis, I am so happy and I know everybody at, you know, MDL and MD Lifespan is excited that we're chatting here and I personally been thinking about this a lot too, is, you know, with heart disease and anything having to do with the heart, like what's the link with toxins and all the environmental stuff that's happening in our everyday lives. So, you know, you're, you're the man that, that we brought in to discuss all of this and, and probably a lot of more, a lot more things. You're seeing patients all the time on this topic. So yeah. Yeah. Thanks for being here today.

Well, absolutely. Pleasure to be here. Really a topic that needs to be discussed. And glad to be here to talk about it.

We talk about it all the time. Toxins are everywhere. And, you know, Dr. Savage is always saying, you know, our houses are typically the most toxic places as well. You know, you're located out in Sarasota, Florida. So you have your own practice there and TPEs getting done, therapeutic plasma exchange there. So I'm just, maybe we'll start there. It's just like, what are you seeing right now right there on the ground floor?

Here in Florida, you know, I think that what I've seen over the past couple of years, probably the last 2 or 3 years since I've really started to develop an interest in toxins and their effects, their cardiovascular, cardiometabolic effects, two of the most common things that I think that we most of the time don't think about, even related to heart disease, are mycotoxins. And obviously we see a lot of that in Florida because of the dampness, moisture, hurricane damage, and things like that.. But I don't think most people even think about mycotoxin, mycotoxin, mold illness as any type of relationship to heart disease at all. But we can talk about that a little bit later and how that happens. But the other thing that is incredibly common is pesticides and herbicides, probably more pesticide. I'm so— probably more herbicides. Well, a combination of both, both pesticides and herbicides. I don't know that I see one more than the other, but You know, we got a lot of golf courses here in Florida. Some people listening to me probably won't like the, you know what I'm saying. But the reality of the matter is the numbers don't lie, the tests don't lie. And so, we see a lot of pesticides and a lot of mycotoxins. And those actually have impact on inflammation and oxidative stress, which I'm sure we'll talk about a lot a little bit later. And those have a big impact on heart disease.

Interesting. Yeah. And I know, yeah, with all the lawns, all the grass, all the maintenance, you know, you're gonna see the herbicides, pesticides.

Yeah.

All the golfers, you know, my, my family included, I tell 'em all the time, I'm like, well, for one, don't bring those shoes in the house, you know?

Yeah, exactly right. Exactly.

Are there any avoidance?

Yeah.

Like, yeah. Are there things that you would recommend on that front?

You know, I mean, just the avoiding wearing your shoes inside, making sure once you come off the golf course, you try to shower as soon as you possibly can. With respect to the herbicides, I mean, a lot of the times also we think about pets, pets that go outside. We keep— I mean, the lawns in Florida are beautiful, right? And a lot of times we have the people come in to spray our lawns to keep them nice and green and healthy. And the pets go outside and roll around in the grass, and then the pets come back inside and they're tracking it all throughout the house and all over people's beds. And so, I mean, it's a really— it's a reality that this happens. But— and I think it— right. I mean, I really want to talk about this just from an awareness perspective. So the people understand that these little things that we take for granted are really, really important with respect to— and this is not just cardiovascular health, right? You know, these toxins that are in our system, we're talking about cardiovascular health because I'm a cardiologist. But the reality of the matter is, I mean, we're talking about things like neurocognitive diseases and autoimmune diseases and cancer, the big C word, if you will. I mean, all of these things are contributed to by these toxins that we're exposed to. So, you know, we, we really need to be more cognizant of some of the things that we can do or things we take for granted that are exposing us to these toxins.

I'm just kind of curious, like, what made you have this realization moment that toxins are a part of this whole picture with, you know, as opposed to maybe what you learned originally with traditional cardiology?

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, let me give you a little bit of background about how a cardiologist, how I even got to this kind of space because You know, I certainly wasn't looking for toxins and wasn't even thinking about toxins as, as a major cause of any type of disease processes. But it really started with my transition from kind of just traditional cardiology practice into practicing more functional medicine, root cause medicine. Um, and in doing that, you know, I started to take care of a lot of different types of patients. I mean, they weren't just all cardiology patients, they were patients with all those things that I just mentioned— autoimmune diseases and and neurocognitive diseases. And in that transition, trying to look for root causes, I came across a test that we were— that was done out of Germany. It was called IGL at that time. And it was a test that looked at— it looked at mitochondrial function, but it also looked at toxins and toxins bound to our DNA. So it looked at specific toxins that were bound to specific loci, chromosomal loci, and where it told us where it was bound, the toxin was bound, what toxin it was. Then it gave you kind of a whole list of toxins that were just in the system as well. And interestingly, you know, when I first saw that test, I was like, man, if this test is really doing what it says it's doing right now, it's going to be incredibly helpful to try to see, you know, if a person has Parkinson's disease, do they have toxins bound at genes that might encode for any type of enzymes that are responsible for Parkinson's disease? Well, it turns out is that's exactly what happened, right? I started to see my first, very first patient was a patient who had ALS. And ALS is a disease that we don't really have a one cause or a cause of ALS. Some of the, some of the ALS cases are actually genetic related, but most are sporadic and don't have a kind of a genetic affiliation. And This patient, because ALS is such a, you know, a disease that we don't have any cures for, most people die from it within kind of 3 to 5 years. I said, you know, I heard about this test in Germany. Why don't we send off this toxin test to Germany and see what happens? Well, it turns out it came back that he had formaldehyde bound to a specific gene loci, and that gene loci did have something to do with what's called the human metabotropic glutamate receptor 2. Big old words, but bottom line is it was bound to a glutamate receptor. And we know that glutamate is a very— it's a pivotal part of the development of ALS. So that was the very first test that I did. And I thought to myself, that was just luck. We just kind of whatever. And then subsequently, that test number 2, 3, and 4, Parkinson's disease with toxins, chlorotoluenine, that was bound to a gene that encodes for tyrosine hydroxylase that makes dopamine. From tyrosine. I mean, I could go on and on with story after story after story. So at that point, I started to realize that, wait a minute, this toxin thing is real. We've been talking about toxins for a long time.

Yeah.

And nobody really ever— when I saw that, I was like, okay, wait a minute, this toxin thing is really real. This toxin is causing lots of chronic diseases. So at that point, I really started to kind of really dive into this toxin, just, just investigating toxins more. I started to do more toxin testing. And lo and behold, the more I tested, the more I started to realize, whoa, okay. And more important than just doing the test, when we did things like to get these toxins out using sauna, using detox protocols, and now using TPE, we start to see the people get better. And then that's when that really, the last 3 years, my practice has entirely changed because that was like a light bulb went off. And in a million years, I didn't wanna be the toxin, the toxin expert. I wasn't looking for that. Yeah, but it found me and then that's kind of how we— and I ended up kind of every single patient that comes through my door, every patient that comes through my door gets environmental toxin testing.

Wow, that's, that's so cool. Okay, what environmental toxin test? So that's— is that the urine test? That— okay, gotcha.

Yep, that's the urine testing. Uh, was same— MD Lifespan uses the same test. It kind of turns out one of the reasons that I got involved with MD Lifespan is you were using the same test that I've been using for the past 3 years.

Yeah, it's a good one. I've done it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We talked a lot about that. It's like once you know your data, then you know where, what you're working from, right?

Right. Right.

Right.

Yeah. And you can't hide from that. You know, I always say now, I mean, you can't hide from, you know, if you pick up all these phthalates and you pick up all the heavy metals and all the other environmental toxins that we're talking about, you can't ignore them. And more, I think the most important thing that I noticed again is As you start to remove those toxins, the patients start to get better from all kinds of things. All of a sudden, all their autoimmune diseases and whatever we call that autoimmune disease gets better. All of a sudden, you know, all of their, you know, from a cardiovascular disease, their hypertension gets better because we are now getting all these toxins out that are making the vessels stiff, right? So it's not just finding the toxins, it's when you remove them, you see people get better.

I can speak personal experience. I've done a few sessions of TPU myself, and yeah, you feel feel it almost immediately. You know, you feel better, whatever better feels like to you. You know? Yeah. Everyone's different. So I'm cur— yeah, because you hear in the, in the news all the time, and I don't know all the details, but, you know, like the, kind of cardiovascular crisis, you know, and, and you hear it a lot, but it, I guess what's your take on that now? Like you hear what, what the media or like whatever's—

Well, you know, this is a really, really, really important point. And I want, I mean, all of your listeners to really take heed to this. You know, For many, many, many years, we have placed the emphasis of heart cardiovascular disease. Okay, we'll talk about cardiometabolic disease a little bit too, hopefully, because, you know, it's more than just vascular disease. But for many, many years, cardiovascular disease has been— we've been told that cholesterol is what causes cardiovascular disease, okay? Cholesterol has a role in the development of vascular disease, but it's cholesterol that has been changed, cholesterol that has been manipulated by other, by oxidative particles or reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress that has made this cholesterol rusty, if you will, right? I tell all my patients, it's the rusty cholesterol that causes heart disease. All right, and so how does that cholesterol get rusty? Well, that cholesterol gets rusty by all of the toxins that are in our environment that cause oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is, you think about a pipe to a 100-year-old house, that pipe over years develops layer upon layer of this orange rust inside that pipe. It just builds up, builds up, and builds up. Well, essentially that's oxidative stress, that is oxidation. And that's what's happening to our body as we get older, we get rusty. Right? And the arteries get rusty. And so that cholesterol is changed into a format— oxidized LDL or lipid peroxides or lipid oxidation products. These are the, these are the type of cholesterol that cause, or lipids that cause heart disease. So I'm not saying that cholesterol doesn't play a role, but we've been too focused on bringing the cholesterol down to a number that gets lower and lower and lower And I can show you patients, and this is what I love about this, I have patients that have a cholesterol of 111 with an LDL of 50, and their heart disease, vascular disease, by CT angiogram, by imaging, is getting worse and worse and worse, right? And how is that happening? If we're gonna blame cholesterol as the root cause, and that's what we're treating to get as low as we can, why is the disease still progressing? Well, the disease is progressing because there's still lots of oxidative stress lots of lipid peroxides, and we can measure those now. We'll talk about that in a little bit because that has really been pivotal as well. We can measure all these oxidative stress, all these oxidative stress molecules. We can measure lipid peroxides. We can measure how oxidative stress is damaging our DNA and RNA, which causes cancer. That has really been a game changer because now we don't have to talk about it in some kind of esoteric way. We can measure it, right? And that's also important because we can measure it And down the road, 4 months, 6 months down the road, we can measure again to make sure whatever strategies we're using, we're getting that oxidative stress, nitrosative stress, another topic, that we're getting that oxidative stress and nitrosative stress better. All right, so where we've gone kind of left, if you will, is trying to blame cholesterol and only treating the cholesterol and missing the forest for the trees by missing the rusty or the oxidative stress that's causing the disease.

Yeah, I wanna talk about that. Like, how do we measure that? Like, let's go deeper there because this is all new to me and I'm sure most—

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, I mean, I was so excited about that. I mean, so Vibrant, the same test that does the environmental toxin test, now has an oxidative stress markers test, right? So it's measuring damage to RNA, DNA, proteins, and lipids, right? And lipid peroxidation, or oxidized or rusty cholesterol is the type of cholesterol lipid that actually causes heart disease. So, we can measure these things out, things like MDA, malondialdehyde, and 4-HNE. We can measure the true molecules or the true particles that are causing this heart disease. We can measure. The same thing about neurocognitive diseases. When proteins are misshaped or not folding normally, it's largely because of oxidative stress and inflammation that are changing the form, how these proteins are folded. And causing things like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. We can measure DNA, RNA damage, protein damage from oxidative and nitrosative stress now.

And again, knowing the data, step one, right? Is like, know where we're staying. Would you recommend everyone to get this kind of test? I mean, you recommend, you know, the environmental test for your patients.

Yeah. So, you know, this is kind of interesting. The test, I mean, this is probably, I don't know, it's probably almost a year old now, maybe. And initially I started out just on every, you know, a few people getting the oxidative stress test. But pretty much now everybody that comes in the door, I'm getting the oxidative stress, an oxidative stress test as well, because it lets me know kind of what's going on and what we need to focus on. We need to come up with a treatment algorithm or treatment plan that's gonna help deal with this oxidative stress. And sometimes I will say this, what I've also learned is sometimes Most of the times it is environmental toxins like the pesticides and all the things we've talked about.

Yeah.

But the other thing that I've learned is that you can't forget about some of these other, the other conditions that cause oxidative stress like infections, Epstein-Barr virus, CMV, Lyme disease, because there've been a few times that we have all the toxins, the toxins are kind of all cleaned up, but the oxidative stress markers are still really high and patients still really sick. So now you kind of got to rethink, well, what am I missing? And just in the last probably year, I started to realize, okay, we still have to look at other things that can cause the oxidative stress as well. So it is important to measure the oxidative stress. It's gotten to the point now too, sometimes I'm just looking at oxidative stress markers, assuming, knowing that there's so— there are very few people who come through this door. Like I said, I get the environmental toxin test on everybody. There's very few people who don't have environmental toxins. They're very, very few.

Yeah, it's unfortunate, but that's what we've talked about a lot here too. Everyone.

So what I really want to know when they come in now, particularly if finances are an issue, they can't afford the test. Okay, fine. Let me just see to what extent, I mean, inflammation markers are not sedative stressed. And then we kind of come up with a regimen on what we're going to do to address it.

Fair. And I'm sure there's some ways to address everybody at a general, but obviously you can get a lot more minutiae, you know, with the data, you know that.

Yeah, and that's the important part of actually knowing though, is because what if there's ongoing exposure? You, I mean, getting the test is always very beneficial because sometimes you got to remember when we do these environmental toxin tests, it doesn't mean that you've been exposed to it yesterday. I mean, this is, this could be a lifetime of toxic exposure because these toxins are stored in your fat cells and the organs, right?

That's right.

And so it doesn't, it's really important that we kind of get a feel for Sometimes there may be ongoing exposure though, okay? And if there is, the first treatment, and we talk about this with, within the Lifespan, is the removal from the source of the toxin that you're being exposed to, right?

I was just chatting with Dr. Savage MD yesterday about my, my, uh, my toxin test after I did my TPE, and he was like, hey, you still have some black mold in you, which I'm like, yeah, that's always frightening. He's like, you got to check your house, you know, a dust test. You know, I interviewed the, the guy on, uh, my pocket, blanking on his name, but on the show here. So that's like something I'm going to do. He's like, you got to address the source. There's something in there.

Right. Absolutely.

Yeah. What would you recommend, I guess, to your folks?

When we talk about clean living is the first part. And what does clean living mean? It means making sure that your water is clean, making sure you have some type of water purification system. I'll tell you, I will never drink another glass of tap water in my life. I don't care where I live. I will never again in my life do that. Because now that I see what I'm seeing, right? I would never ever do that again. The food that we eat, they're trying to eat organic as much as we possibly can to avoid the pesticides and herbicides that we talked about. Your inside environment, the pots and pans and things that we cook with, really important. All of the plastics and the PFAS, perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, OSs that are in the pots and pans. We measure those on that, on the test, on the Vibrant test as well. And it's appalling to see, you know, all of those, all of those type of environmental toxins. Some of the things that we see from all of the furniture and with the water repellents and stuff like that, very, very common as well. So, you know, we don't, you can't live in a bubble. But it's just being aware of all of the things, the things like the water, the food sources, those are I think the biggies. Mycotoxins, mold again, that's one that I think is horribly under-tested and under-appreciated. I can joke about this now, but it's really not, it's not something to joke about. People who have severe mycotoxin illness, they are very sick. Okay, uh, and unfortunately, a lot of times mycotoxin illness can start to affect people from a neurocognitive perspective as well, right? So they become very anxious, they have a lot of random pain. And I can remember if it was probably 7, 8 years ago, you know, that it would have been before I kind of started to practice the medicine like I practice now. It was those type people who came in and you, you just say, okay, here's Miss Johnson, she's crazy. Okay, I can't even— I think about it now and I'm kind of— I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm also saying it so that the people listening can understand that if you're just a layperson, that okay, there is— there still may be something wrong with you and you're not crazy. And then any practitioners that are listening, I can tell you, if you're one of those people, you think, oh, they're crazy, they're crazy. Mycotoxin illness, Lyme disease that causes this limbic system hypersensitivity, and people you can't make heads or tails of their symptoms. You better start thinking about those type of illnesses because they're absolutely real and you can help these people tremendously. I don't know how many people that we've probably just kind of shipped off as crazy that aren't crazy. They have mycotoxin illness or some other, or some other multiple chemical sensitivity from the environmental toxins. Those are the type of things that I look back now and think, man, oh man, oh man, I, because I've just seen so many of them now. So I kind of, we need to wake up because those people aren't crazy. They, they have neurocognitive issues that are triggered by inflammation and oxidative stress that's going on in the brain.

It's scary because, yeah, I've heard a lot of different stories about how mold mycotoxins can affect us and everyone. It seems kind of different for everybody. Yeah, it's hard to nail it down, right?

Absolutely.

It has me kind of thinking actually just myself because I'm like, yeah, I've had definitely anxious moments. I'm like, I haven't actually felt that and I had a lot of mold in me. I'm like, mm-hmm. Could have been something there. I don't know.

But yeah.

Yeah. Feeling good now. But how, how does that like mycotoxin specifically and mold How would that affect the heart and heart disease? Is there anything?

Yeah, along the same lines, you know, this is why in a million years, if you asked a cardiologist, I'm probably one of 5 or 10 cardiologists in the United States that would even say that mycotoxins have anything to do with heart disease. Wow. But at the end of the day, heart disease is caused by inflammation and vascular damage. Okay. Anything that causes inflammation and vascular damage can promote cardiovascular disease. And just like if it was a heavy metal, I mean mercury, lead, we know that those are, those can actually contribute to vascular disease. But just like those metals, they cause inflammation and oxidative stress. Mycotoxins do the same thing. So why wouldn't mycotoxins, it's the oxidative stress and those molecules that change the lipids into a format that causes the heart disease. So why wouldn't anything that causes oxidative stress cause heart disease. And there are papers, multiple papers written on mycotoxin illness and heart disease, now vascular disease, uh, and metabolic disease. We didn't talk about that yet, but cardiometabolic disease really has to do with more of, um, your insulin and, and, and glucose regulation, which then causes more issues with, um, oxidative stress and, and, and the mitochondrial functioning abnormally as well. So So mycotoxins, just like any other toxin, can cause heart disease as well. So always need to be, you need to always think about that when you see, when I, again, I'm measuring oxidation status in every single patient. And when I see oxidation levels high, vascular inflammation markers, that's another topic. There are specific, there is a specific marker, lipoprotein phospholipase A2, LP-PLA2. That is a pretty specific vascular inflammation marker. You really can't have progression of heart disease if you don't have any underlying inflammation of the, of the vessel. And so I'm always looking at whether there is elevation in that particular marker, because that, that tells me that there's still something in their system that's driving vascular inflammation.

Again, it's, it's, it's an indicator, right, to just go a little deeper and figure out, okay, what it is.

Exactly.

For example, interesting. Anything else on, on, um, yeah, cardio metabolic disease that you feel is, I guess, the most relevant, you know, relevant to the whole toxin discussion here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think one thing that I think is incredibly important, and this is not something that a lot of people are talking about yet, but I'll tell you that it is very important, and I will tell you also that it will be— more people will be talking about it, and I'm particularly going to be talking about it, so I'm going to talk about it here today, um, is that we've talked about Oxidative stress a lot. People have heard the term oxidative stress, getting rusty inside. Well, just as important as oxidative stress and maybe even more important, I don't know yet, but we'll see soon, is nitrosative stress. And nitrosative stress is stress. It's very similar to oxidative stress and it causes a rusting, if you will, But it is, it's triggered, it's caused by nitric oxide levels, nitric oxide that's produced by your monocytes or macrophages. It's called inducible nitric oxide synthase. Nitric oxide is produced at extremely high levels. Now, we've all been taught that nitric oxide is great and we need that nitric oxide, which we do. It's a very important molecule. But toxins upregulate this enzyme called iNOS, inducible nitric oxide synthase. And it produces orders of magnitude higher nitric oxide. That nitric oxide then ends up combining with something called superoxide, which is a oxidative— is a reactive oxygen species. And then that actually produces a molecule that's very dangerous with oxidative and nitrosative stress called peroxynitrite.

Okay.

Remember that word, peroxynitrite. For anybody— if anybody, the doctors are listening or practitioners listen, You just do a search of peroxynitrite and any chronic disease that you know, including cardiovascular disease. Um, peroxynitrite is driven by the production of this, uh, increased nitric oxide. Well, what causes the increase in this nitric oxide? Again, the toxins cause increased nitric oxide from this inducible nitric oxide synthase. It uncouples the good enzyme that makes nitric oxide called eNOS, and you end up with a lot of this oxidative and nitrosative stress. Very, very deep into the science here, but I can— what basically, you got a lot of rustiness happening because of oxidative and nitrosative stress. Got triggered by what? Triggered by the toxins that we're exposed to.

Yeah.

So that's something that— and so figuring out how we can address nitrosative stress and oxidative stress is really a key. And that's what I work on in my practice, figuring out modalities. How do we decrease oxidative stress and nitrosative stress levels? Now, the other thing that's super cool, I was talking about this over the past 2 years and all of the talks that we gave at A4M and things like that. That Vibrant test, okay, that I just told you about that measures oxidative stress measures oxidative and nitrosative stress.

Okay.

So again, it's no longer something we just talk about. There it is, right? So one of the main— the main metabolite of peroxynitrite is nitrotyrosine. And that's one of the markers they measure. And guess what I see in all my patients with heart disease? Nitrotyrosine that's elevated. Okay, so now the story is being built. Okay, and now we have a way to routinely measure this. And so the more data we get with this nitrotyrosine, and there are a couple of other nitrosative stress markers, we're going to see just as important as oxidative stress, the nitrosative stress is. And so how do we need to address the nitrosative stress? Which, figuring out that part, we're still— I'm still kind of— I got some things I don't really want to talk about them yet, um, but there's some ways that we can actually address nitrosative stress. But at the end of the day, you have to prevent the nitrosative stress from even occurring, which means dealing with the toxins that we're exposed to.

That's the root. Yeah, it sounds like. Yeah, which is inflammation, right? Yeah, or causes the inflammation, the fire that's happening.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Cool. Well, thank you for dropping all the, the different, you know, because I'm going to go down some rabbit holes. I was already kind of searching on the side here as you were talking through. And I hope that, that kind of opens up a new vein of research for folks listening too.

Yeah.

Physician or not. So I'm kind of curious now, you know, as TPE or therapeutic plasma exchange, as you've been, you know, recommending that and you actually do that in the office, right? In your, in your practice. Yeah. Cool. Cool, right? Is it Mitch over there with you? Is he—

yes, Mitch is over here with me.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've had Mitch on the show before, so he's a great guy.

He's great, great skill set.

Absolutely, man. Well, how's it— I guess, how's it been, like, in terms of, you know, patient— I guess some of the before and after, like, have you seen some interesting turnaround cases, some stories?

Yeah, you know, we, we've been— uh, we haven't been doing it that long. Um, I've had a few of my patients go through and they actually just feel like they've had, you know, a lot more energy. As far as the, you know, in a perfect world, can we reverse heart disease because of this? I can't tell you anything like that. You know, in fact, that's something that would take, you know, it's not gonna be something that happens in 6 months, year, 2, 3. So it's a little tough to know from that perspective right now. But what I can tell you is that the toxin load clearly is improved. And we're starting to see, because this oxidative and nitrosative stress test is fairly new, But we're also starting to see that those markers are improved as well. So that's a sign of things to come, is we are improving the amount of toxins that are in a person's system, as well as the oxidative stress markers, which are a major culprit for, again, not just cardiovascular disease, all of those other chronic diseases that we talked about as well.

Yeah.

So I think that we're gonna see some real, I mean, some really interesting things to come. It's just kind of early for me to kind of say, you know, well, This is what happened. So I'm definitely looking forward to getting more of this information to kind of get some of this data.

Oh yeah. It sounds like you're building the story, right? The narrative and, and the dots are starting to connect. So it's still early, which is great.

Yeah.

But yeah, at least it's going the right direction, it seems like. But like you said, toxins, you know, like the fact that there's, there's improvement happening along the way is—

And pretty major improvements. I mean, the, the mycotoxins, I mean, I mean, we've seen some pretty major improvements after the TPE.

Yeah, that's, that's wild. I'm just trying to think, is there anything else that, that we haven't gone on some of these other topics, you know, in terms of addressing, you know, root cause just from your perspective?

You know, we can maybe talk a little bit more about the cardiometabolic. I didn't go into too much detail about that, but I wanna, I wanna talk about cardiometabolic disease a little bit more simply because, you know, I think people know about vascular disease and we talk about, developing blockages in the arteries. But when we say cardiometabolic, what does that mean? What does cardiometabolic mean? And so I wanna kind of just kind of double-click on that just for a little bit, just because I think it's so important. When we talk about metabolic health in general, okay, we're essentially talking about how we take the food that we eat and turn it into energy. That's kind of what metabolism is, right? When we talk about our metabolism. And the main mechanism by which that occurs is that, you know, our food, we take in the carbohydrates and fats, and that has to actually be broken down and end up going to our mitochondria, or the cells that help us produce, or the cells that produce our currency of energy called ATP. Well, in the process of producing energy, the mitochondria are also that same organelle that produce most of the reactive oxygen species in our body. So we've talked about oxidative stress being a problem. Well, we have to produce energy, and then that same organelle that produces the energy produces oxidative stress. So, ah, well, what— how does that all work, right?

Yeah.

So it's really important that we have some efficiency of the mitochondria, but we also have to have the antioxidants that we all talk about, right? So we all know that antioxidants are good for us. Vitamin C and vitamin E and vitamin A and glutathione. And everybody knows about all these things, but why are they important? What does an antioxidant do? Well, it helps to mitigate the effects of all this oxidative stress that's being produced as we make energy, make ATP. Well, cardiometabolic disease is when those mitochondria are not very efficient. And so they are at the expense of when they're producing ATP, it's at the expense of producing lots and lots of these reactive oxygen species.

Right.

And so that electron transport chain or the— all the system by which this— your, your, your, your, your carbohydrates get converted to energy, it's not very efficient. So it's producing all this oxidative stress. Yeah. And so— and that's what kind of when we talk about cardio metabolic disease, when it's inefficient, we're producing more reactive oxygen species, more rust. So I'm getting more rusty, causing things like insulin insensitivity. Okay, or insulin resistance, which is your, as we eat our carbohydrates and it gets broken down to glucose, that glucose can't be used very well, right? It can't get into the muscle cells and the insulin can't drive that glucose into the cells because of this whole oxidative stress that damages the cell membranes. And so what I wanna just kind of make it at a very high level, what ends up happening, we have so much, we have so many issues in today's world with the world of obesity. Obesity, right? And a lot of this obesity is driven by insulin resistance. Okay. And so where and how and where do toxins come in here? Well, toxins jam up that entire process, that electron transport chain in the mitochondria. One of the main things that these toxins do is they come in and they actually— this whole set of complexes that make energy ends up making more oxidative stress than they are making energy because the toxins are jamming up the system.

Right, right. It's getting clogged up.

So it's super important that we get these toxins out so that those mitochondria can continue to make energy efficiently and not at the expense of producing more and more oxidative stress.

I see. So it's this tricky balance there to have them function properly.

Okay.

And I mean, don't, I don't, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but like if mitochondria are not working properly, then cells eventually are starting to die, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

So it's like we gotta make sure those things are cleaned up properly so that all, all the chain, yeah, is again the chain effect, uh, is the systems are going to run properly. The organs will still function and function.

We always talk about, we really say, I mean, there, I mean, every chronic illness that I can think of is there is a result of mitochondrial, uh, mitochondrial issues, right? And so, and when you can, when we can, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer. I mean, if you just look, I mean, just again, do a PubMed search of any of those things and guess what it boils down to? Mitochondrial inefficiency.

And again, toxins are the things that clog up those and it's this, yeah, back to the root. It's wild. I think we're going to learn so much. And as you've already been doing yourself, you know, with your, with your own testing and research, but I'm just, I don't know, I'm pretty excited for the next handful of years to see what's going to happen, not only with the people doing the toxin removals, but just what's possible, you know, with all this testing and all that.

You know, my hope is that we will be addressing a lot of the chronic illnesses that we deal with and we won't have to do, I mean, a lot of the therapies and medicines and things and procedures that we're doing. If we address the root cause of why we ended up with the inflammation and oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction in the first place, we likely won't need all of this other stuff. And I don't think it's rocket science. To me, when people come through my door, like I had a person yesterday, and one of the things he wrote on his sheet was, I want to know what— he's been given all these diagnoses and he said, I want to know what autoimmune disease I have. And the first thing I said, I said, well, we can give your disease a name, But at the end of the day, this disease that you have, this autoimmune disease, is being caused by your immune system being inefficient for some reason. And what's likely driving that immune system inefficiency are toxins or some type of infection. So we can call it whatever autoimmune disease we want to call it. But if my body is attacking itself, okay, there's a problem with that immune system and there is a reason for it. It just— I wasn't just born with it., right? And I think that's the problem that kind of, kind of bothers me about kind of some of the way we practice medicine right now. I can put you on steroids, I can put you on other immune modulating agents, but why am I doing that when we're not even trying to figure out why my body is attacking itself in the first place? Fix the gut health, and a lot of times you don't have all these autoimmune diseases. Um, so it's just kind of things like that that I hope, uh, will help. That getting rid of these toxins will be a great start at optimizing kind of overall immune function, mitochondrial function, and a lot of these chronic illnesses hopefully will be improved.

Hopefully. And so I think it starts with a lot of the education like we're doing here and obviously the testing as well. But then it's the ongoing, right? It's the avoidance of this after whatever intervention might have been done in the process. Hopefully keeping that up. Just to wrap up, like what, And you might have already said it, but if there's something else, like what makes you the most excited for, let's say, in the next year or so, or something that you're personally working towards?

Just bringing an awareness, bringing an awareness to this entire subject. You know, I was at an event, it was kind of a, it was a Maha kind of sponsored event. And, you know, everybody's talking about, you know, where are the problems and where can we make a difference? And so, I asked a question. I was sitting at a table of individuals and I said, how many people, how many people here have had an environmental toxin test? Hey, you know how many hands went up?

None.

Zero, right?

Zero.

For a subject that is so important. And I'm, I'll ask the audience who's listening, how many of you have had an environmental toxin test? And I can tell you it's not many. Why not? Yeah, that That's my goal is for people to have, after thousands of these tests being done on my patients that come through this door now, and again, like I said, every single person now gets it because of what I've seen.

Yeah.

Why don't we all have it? Why isn't it that when you go to the doctor with your autoimmune condition, why isn't it that we don't order an environmental toxin test?

That's right.

That's the awareness that I'm trying to really promote.

Yeah. I know when I saw my data originally, I was like, woo, okay.

So that's it. Mine too. My own too. Same thing, same thing. Absolutely. Same thing.

But it gives you motivation, right? Or I reckon at least, maybe not everyone, but now you'll start to, you'll start to realize things.

I'll tell you, this is my personal story here. I did my own and I had a mycotoxin called ochratoxin. And ochratoxin is commonly, most commonly from coffee and particularly the little coffee pods, Nespresso, Keurig. And for the, I don't know how long my wife and I both were doing this Nespresso. We just love our Nespresso. Both of us had ochratoxin through the roof, right?

I'm right there with you. My wife as well.

And so it's a wake-up call.

It is. Wake up. What do you do? I'm curious.

I stopped using Nespresso.

We have plastics in that too, right? So you have the cups.

Yes, exactly. No, so I mean, I did a lot. I mean, I basically do— I mean, I'm a big, big, big sauna believer. And so I mean, I sauna every day. I sauna 7 days a week.

Yeah.

I love it.

I'm just— I'm here. What's your protocol like? How do you use it?

Um, I typically will just do a 30-minute, um, whenever I sweat around 142 degrees. So I typically will go 142 for 30 minutes. And I do— I mean, I truly do— if I'm in town, I'm doing sauna 7 days, 6, 7 days a week.

Cool.

Um, I don't use a whole— every now and then maybe a binder. I don't use a lot of binders. I mean, I just found And I've seen in my patients too, but I've found that if you use a sauna that frequently, a lot of times it will move a lot of those toxins out. Not sometimes the PFAS. I didn't— fortunately, I didn't have a lot of PFAS elevation, but sometimes those, those are much harder to get out, uh, just with sauna. Um, but, um, a lot of the other, a lot of the other, um, environmental toxins are, uh, amenable to sauna treatment.

I like, I like to hear that. I'm obsessed with my sauna. If I, if I miss a day or two, I'm like, it's in my head, I'm like, man, Happy place.

Well, there's so many other things that the sauna does too, but I, I, I'll joke up to my staff and my patients that I might as well become a sauna salesman.

I know I am with my group of people. So, uh, on the coffee thing though, I think that's a very, that's a big one because that's, we did a whole episode actually and I broke down coffee and mold and coffee. Even if you feel like it's, it's clean, you know, that you gotta do your research and how it's been shipped, it's packaged and, uh, you know, shade grown or not. It's a lot of stuff. So definitely, I think probably more, more often it's not just the Nespressos, it's like if you're just buying other coffee.

Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a lot, a lot to it with the coffee, but it's, it's, it's a real, it's a real problem. And, um, you know, one of the things we didn't touch on, we should probably touch on this too really quickly just as we end up, you know, it's, it's not always what and how much you are exposed to. I think it's incredibly important to realize that each of us are individuals with, with different detox pathways, different abilities to mobilize and get rid of these toxins. And that depends on lots of things, your micronutrient status, your gut health, and other genetics, the genetics of detoxification, your methylation genetics, your glutathione genetics. And so those always have to be taken in consideration. You and your husband may live in the same home and you may be sick as crap, and he may be fine because of different detox ability. So it's really important to note that it's not always about, you know, just what you're exposed to. There's a lot of other factors that go into how it could, how it could affect your health.

Yeah, that's a, that's an interesting point. I know Dr. Savage has talked about that before, and I don't know if there's any ways to map the detox, but you know, which ones, I don't know if that, that kind of test is out there.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, the other thing, I mean, it's always good. I mean, genetic testing, I mean, I do genetic testing on every patient too, right? So, so you understand the methylation genetics, you understand glutathione genetics, you understand histamine genetics. Now, your genetics are just propensities. It doesn't mean that, you know, because I have a gene variant that I'm gonna have XYZ, right? But it certainly gives you some propensities for things to happen and it helps you kind of plan on other strategies. If somebody has 4 major glutathione gene variants, then you're going to focus on optimizing the glutathione pathway. Maybe give them more glutathione to help them with these detox pathways.

I got you. So, you're basically supplementing for the different variants that— Right. Okay. That makes sense. So, genetic testing, the— whatever the— obviously, the environmental toxin testing and—

Oxidative stress testing.

Oxidative stress. All right.

Yep.

Any other tests that you would recommend your patients?

Micronutrient testing. Micronutrient testing, because if you don't have enough of the cofactors, for example, superoxide has manganese as a cofactor.

Okay.

Copper is a cofactor. If you are deficient in any of these, any of these micronutrients, then a lot of the antioxidants don't work. The cofactors in other processes, if you don't have the body— God made the body to heal itself, but we have to have, we have to have the appropriate micronutrients for that to happen, right? So again, I— micronutrient testing is also very important, uh, in trying to optimize a person's ability to detoxify.

Beautiful. Cool. I got some— I got some work to do personally, and I'm sure got a lot of notes here for, for everybody to do their homework. So, yeah, Dr. Christopher Davis, I appreciate you a ton, man.

Yeah, absolutely.

Shout out exactly where people should go follow you, go check out your practice, especially if they're in the Florida Sarasota area.

Absolutely. My practice is Reveal Vitality, revealvitality.com. Easy, easy address. You can catch me on Instagram @cjdavismd, and you'll see me talking a lot about environmental toxins and where the problems are. When I give talks, a lot of them are on environmental toxins, everything that we talked about today, because I feel it's so important for us to be aware and educated about them.

Well, appreciate you for leading that, man, and being part of MD Lifespan too, because Good things are coming, planting the seeds for a lot of great things to help a lot of people.

So absolutely. Well, good to be here and good talking to you.

Insane, man. Have a great one.