The Metabolic Code, Drug Induced Microbiome Disruption, Aging, and More!

you're going down the drain just a little bit at a time, and it— or fast, right? And we just haven't— we haven't done enough education that we really get, you know, individual out there can go, wow, I have a chance, I can do something. And I think that's where we need to move. That's why I'm grateful you're doing this Peptide Summit, because, you know, you're going to learn tremendous, tremendous things from, you know, everything that you've got to offer them and all the guests that you've got. It's I mean, you know, let's get people thinking.

Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity Podcast, redefining aging and transforming health. Each week, Dr. Kent Holtorf will dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity alongside visionary physicians and experts. We'll explore how peptides, cutting-edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age. Get ready to transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started.

Hello, this is Dr. Kent Holtorf with another episode. Today we are honored to have Dr. James Lavalle, uh, to talk about, uh, metaflammation and aging. And this is just such a key topic. It's a term that you'll hear more and more about, and we got, uh, you know, James here, and thank you. He is a renowned speaker. Everyone wants a piece of him, so thank you, uh, letting us have a piece of you, um, and it's, it's much appreciated.

Well, I'm glad to be here, man. I'm always excited to get to chat with you over kind of the latest and greatest of what's going on with chemistry, so it's going to be fun.

Awesome, awesome. Just a little bit about Jim, uh, He was very humble in his bio. You know, people just seek his advice from everywhere, the sports world to the, you know, celebrity, to, you know, all the rich and famous around the world flock to him, even, you know, just to get that little extra edge in whether it be sports or in life. Uh, so he's internationally recognized, definitely clinical pharmacist, author, board-certified clinical nutritionist, expert and educator. He's so generous with his knowledge. I've seen him speak so, uh, many times and just loved sucking up all his information.

Uh, and he pretty much knows everything about everything.

I think that, that sums it up. Um, and really integrative precision health. Uh, he's known for his expertise in integrative therapies and metabolic issues. I think is his really, uh, core passion, uh, and really keep people from feeling healthy, vital, um, and everything from that athlete to the couch potato and, and how to make them live better and live better longer. Uh, a thought leader to say the least, um, drug and nutrient depletion. Uh, he's published 4 books, 3 databases in his area alone. He has algorithms that he's been working on to help doctors actually treat patients, um, and make it simple for them. So he takes the super complex, it makes it makes it seem like, damn, that's not too bad.

Um, with over 35 years of experience in natural and integrative therapies, uh, various medical and business, he's a consultant to, I think, pretty much everyone I know. Um, but, uh, uh, and his latest research is drug-induced microbiome disruption. But he's got his hands in everything, and in terms of there's, there's not much he doesn't know a ton about. And so, um, thank you for being on. I don't know where this is gonna go.

Good.

Uh, which is, which is so fun to talk to him because we have, you know, so many doctors like, oh, I gotta prepare for this. He knows this.

What—

talk about that? You want to talk about that? I want to talk about that. He will tell you things that you never know. In fact, just before we're on, I learned like 3 new words, you know. So, uh, uh, it's awesome. Again, thank you for being on. Uh, it's, it's, it's such an honor. So, uh, metaflammation, right? What the heck is metaflammation?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, you know, back when I wrote the book Cracking the Metabolic Code back in 2002, of course it took me 3 times writing that book and it was 660 pages to get it right. So, uh, took a while.

600 pages.

Yeah, yeah, it was one of my short-form books, unfortunately.

So, so I'm surprised you finished it because I could never finish a book because I keep wanting to add to it.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I, I had trouble with that initially, but, you know, I'm on book 22 now, uh, and so I've got 2 books coming out this year. One is the new rendition of The Metabolic Code, and then another one's on sports performance and maximizing performance and recovery through looking at biomarkers and through that lens. And, you know, it's interesting, I, I've always, I've always got this one more thing I need to write about, uh, and, uh, it's just kept me on that journey. I'm hoping these are the last two books, but I think I don't think I got a few more coming, I think. But yeah, Metaflammation. So when I wrote The Metabolic Code, I was looking around, I'd been working on people for about 15 years, and I'm going, you know what, Metabolism is way more than how many calories you are burning. You know, and so my original premises on Metabolic Code was, you know, your metabolism today, so where you are sitting today, if you are listening, it is really the sum total of everything that has gone on from the time you were gestated to now. So, when you think about that epigenetics, if you think about that aspect of even generationally, 2 or 3 generations back, your family lineage was giving your information, your DNA, a way to behave. Maybe even if you weren't exposed to that, you, you know, maybe your grandparents were exposed to something like lead arsenate and it affected their DNA. We end up playing that out right from the start. Yeah, from that point forward, it's what's my stressors like? My— what's your diet like? When I was a kid, I was the guy to know because I would bring a box of Hostess Ho-Hos into school and give them out to everybody. My mom was a Hostess mom, right?

You're like, first one's free. Um, and yeah, I am Italian. It's interesting with that. So studies are showing that, let's say, the mom is stressed, it not only affects the baby but her baby's babies. That's exactly how the genes are translated.

That's exactly right. And, you know, handle stress as well. No, that's— and, you know, that lineage is interesting, you know, because, you know, back in 1756 there was a guy by the name of Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann wrote the Organon of Medicine, so he was the founder of homeopathy. And when he talked about, you know, this genetic transference, he called them miasms, where everybody laughed at Hahnemann, you know. I mean, everybody's laughing at Hahnemann up to about 5 years ago until all this stuff stuff has come out about this transgenerational genetic information that gets passed on. And, you know, he really said, like, genetics—

it's not—

that's exactly right. It's all malleable and moldable. And you know what? It's kind of our responsibility to talk about this with folks so they start to clean their act up, so 2 and 3 generations down, maybe their offspring have a chance, right? Because, you know, so when you look at that, then you look at, well, what was my diet? You know, for me as a child, I thought, I thought the pink stuff, the bubblegum-flavored amoxicillin, that was a part of my meal plan, man. I mean, I'd had that like part of my meal plan. And then the biggest treat was when I got my Dimetapp, the grape-flavored Dimetapp, at the end of the night because I couldn't breathe through my nose, you know. And it was because for me, I was very allergic to dairy. I had multiple rounds of antibiotics. My gut microbiome got messed up. And so, pretty sickly kid, you know? And so, when you start to look at what is your metabolism? So, your metabolism is all of the biochemical reactions in your body that are going on right now. It's that sum total of what I call whole body metabolism. It's either driving you to homeostasis, meaning I am somewhat suspending aging or I am triggering metaflammation. What is metaflammation? Metaflammation is metabolic inflammation. So, your body starts to make more disruptive chemistry. You stop making the signal substances that allow for your body to repair, and instead, you are in this low-grade inflammatory fight that leads to another term that is in the literature, inflammaging. Inflammatory aging. And, you know, I mean, a great example, unfortunately, with the pandemic, people that had diabetes, people that were overweight, people that had heart disease, people that already had pre-existing inflammatory signaling in their body were more prone to, you know, this infection. Well, guess what? That's been happening. And, you know, you know, you know, Kent, here's the thing. If somebody has an accident and they're a diabetic or they're overweight, when they hit that emergency room, many more times they have adverse events going on because they've got that inflammatory chemistry happening. So it's not just a matter of it's a bug, it's any stressful event. Because when you have metabolic inflammation on board, your metabolic reserve to be resilient and your metabolic reserve to, to have durability in terms of the way you're living, all of that starts to dwindle. And so when you think of metaflammation, what I really hope people understand, it's kind of the position that your body is in and what you're going through and how your future is going to be molded because of that. So am I going to end up with autoimmune disorder? Am I placking my arteries? Am I going to have dementia? Am I going to have kidney failure? What's going to be the process? Or am I going to move towards a better lifespan where there's health in it? And I think that's one of the things— I know we're talking about the Peptide Summit, so for me, I think peptides are important from the standpoint of, hey, it's another signaling compound, it helps us get us there. But it's important to understand that once you're metabolically inflamed, here's what starts to happen. You get disorders in iron metabolism. So you start to, you start to see a loss of being able to store ferritin. And I know you're the thyroid man, and I have no doubt I'll never know half as much about thyroid metabolism as you do, but we know that you need ferritin to make thyroid hormones function. And so your ferritin doesn't— you don't store ferritin in your bone marrow. In your reticuloendothelial system, you don't make EPO.

Yeah, you, you get a thyroid resistance.

Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's, that's first, that's step one. So that means people start to feel palpitations, they feel fatigued, they get lethargic, uh, they don't oxygenate their tissue as well. And you and I both know when you're not oxygenating your cells well, you're creating oxidative damage in that cell, which is going to lead to a different kind of which seems opposite.

No oxygen, no oxidative damage. But yeah, the dysfunctional mitochondria, when they're not making energy, they're pumping out reactive oxygen species, all this oxidation.

Well, and the byproduct of that is, is as soon as I become less efficient at that ox-phos relationship, right, that oxidative phosphorylation relationship, my cell is forced into a different way of doing things. I can't carry glucose into my cell anymore. And that means I can't make 38 packets of ATP every time I carry that glucose in. Now, I turn into what's called the Warburg effect, which I've been, you know, I actually wrote a chapter in a book called Diabetes and Cancer: Epidemiologic Links and Molecular Evidence. Perfect for nighttime reading. You'll put you right out and you read one paragraph and you're gone. But the point is, is that so as you get metabolically inflamed, you become less efficient at energy production. You make more lactate, you make more pyruvate. You only make 2 packets of energy. So do you want to make 38 packets? Do you want to make 2 packets? And when you're only making those 2 packets, your cells getting toxic and making more oxidative, uh, stress and free radicals.

Why is that different than doing sprints and getting anaerobic exercise?

Well, because, because you're— in the end, you're getting, you're getting reperfusion and getting oxygen efficiency after you do that sprint. The problem you get into is when your body's operating that way all the time. So as you increase that, that lactate in the cell, you trigger something called hypoxia-inducible factor. And that tells your DNA that, hey, you could be immortal. So it starts to change the way your cell behaves. And now all of a sudden we have what's known as the Warburg effect. But that's pretty far down the line. I mean, the early things that start to happen after the iron stores are going bad and you're not oxygenating well—

God, all the sick Lyme patients have no iron. Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. But that's because they're metabolically inflamed. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people don't relate to that because they go, what do you mean? What are you talking about? I got an infection, what's that got to do with my iron?

Because they also think acutely, ferritin's acute phase reactant should go up, right? But yeah, it may at one, one point, but goes down. And I think it plays the point where your body's made like inflammation, you get an infection, inflammation's not bad. But it needs to go back to baseline. But when it's constantly up, it's a whole different story.

That's exactly it. You're supposed to reset that inflammatory defense, right? And once it stays up, that's, that's where the iron metabolism comes in. And then dyslipidemia, like, I get tired of people saying to me, lipids don't matter. Uh, sorry, if you're—

Statin deficiency.

Yeah, of course it's a statin deficiency. Isn't it in our water? Yeah, it is. But that's— but beside the point. But, but the reality is, when you look at a lipid profile, if you're looking at oxidized LDL and apolipoprotein B and lipoprotein little a, you're looking at all these fractions of lipids that are bad actor lipids that are damaging your tissues. That's because of metabolic inflammation that's taking place.

So they want to treat this where they need to be treating upstream, way upstream.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and so, you know, but it's interesting, it's different for different populations. So for example, if you look at lipoprotein, if you're not diabetic, having a high lipoprotein is really bad. If you're diabetic, the lower your Lp, the more you're at risk. That just came out. Really? Yes, really. In an excess of 12,000 diabetics that were, that were followed, the lower the Lp, the more their cardiovascular damage occurred. But it's just what you said. As you're ramping up and creating these high numbers in some of these particles that are bad, it's creating damage, creating damage, creating damage, and then all of a sudden the ceiling falls. And now all of a sudden that number is different for a different population.

And so it's kind of like with their Lyme patients, they're hypercoagulable, you know, they're clot— excess clotting, and their sed rates are super low, uh, CRP's low. Oh, you're so healthy. Yeah, uh, no.

Yeah, not quite. Yeah, right, exactly. It's kind of like that thing you hear about all the time, at least I learned in pharmacy school, was it a biphasic response, right? We have a, you know, a little bit of something is good, a lot of something is bad. And if you do a lot of something for long enough, it creates a little bit of something again, right? That is the biphasic response, the laws in pharmacology. And so, you start to look at, so, OK, so my oxygen is disturbed, my lipids become more damaged, my insulin receptors now progress to that insulin receptor resistance where now I am more sympathetic dominant, right? Because When you're pumping out insulin, here comes the adrenaline and noradrenaline, man. I'm pumping that out and now my blood vessels are getting really tight and, and not distensible. And then in addition to that, you start to let your nervous system ride into this point of releasing a lot of corticotropin-releasing hormone into the periphery.

Ah, mast cells.

So the mast cells, the leukotrienes, you get the leaky gut phenomena from it. All of that starts to cycle in because I've now created this metabolic inflammation, and that was due to— I was in it, maybe you're in an accident, it's psychogenic stress, it's diet, it's drug therapies. There's drug therapies that do a great job of doing this, right? I mean, we know that. It could be a vector, could be a biotoxin, you know, it can be mold, it can, it can be a— it could be Lyme, it could be any, any vector, right?

Stress, you know. And I think, you know, it's so much harder nowadays. I mean, I— everyone I know, I don't know if you're at a cocktail party or something, like, I don't know, they come to you probably all the time. I mean, they're sick, or their brother, cousin, friend, everyone's freaking sick. And they go, I go to my doctor, they said I'm fine, but I can't get out of bed.

I mean, I don't think you saw this stuff 20 years ago, you know.

I'll tell you what, it's a— it's pretty amazing as I look at this. I was very blessed to literally be doing this work starting in 1985, and when I saw everything going on then versus what I see today, it's a lot more work to get somebody well, way more work than when it was when I started out. And I was lucky, I had incredible mentors, and I— and, you know, their practices, they were seeing 600 patients a week doing personalized medicine, you know. I mean, they were cranking 5 rooms at a time, and I, I was like drinking from a fire hose. But what it taught me was you've got to look at this metabolism, because the other thing is it progresses. So as your oxygenation is poor, you're damaging your, your enterocytes, right, the lining of the intestine. You're damaging the endothelium, that one-cell lining in the arteries, and you're damaging the blood-brain barrier, which is one cell layer thick. Now all of a sudden we start to see neuroinflammatory responses, right? We turn on the glial cells.

Oh yeah, the brain on fire, man.

Brain gets on fire. And now all of a sudden I start to change my plasticity. I get a, like, an aberrant neuronal signaling. I'm not making neurotransmitters anymore. I'm, I'm making phenolic compounds like beta-carboline, you know, and salsolinol, instead of making dopamine and serotonin. and now it starts to create mood disorders. And then the last piece to this, which is exactly what you talked about, uh, before we even got on and we're recording, that's when you start to get into the mitochondrial failure and the loss of mitochondrial biogenesis and the ability to create mitochondrial resuscitation. And that's metaflammation. Metaflammation is what causes us to age. Uh, you know, it's our metabolic clock. And yeah, it is, you know, and the reality is we got to get all the tools out and we got to create as much of force against that as we can, especially the sicker someone is, so that we can start to reprogram our, literally, our cellular signaling to say, oh, it is OK, we are back to normal. Our allostatic load, which is kind of what happens, right? When you get under stress long enough, no matter what kind of stress, physical, whether it is a premier athlete. At, you know, an executive or a working mom, whoever, you get under enough stress and you go from proper signaling of your brain to all the hormonal and catecholamine networks and neurochemical networks we need to what is called allostatic load where it changes the way your brain fundamentally communicates with the rest of your body. I spend as much time working on that gut-brain connection so that I can make sure I'm getting that a more harmonious signal to the adrenals, the thyroid, to the kidneys, right? We need that harmonious signaling. And I think that's what we're really, you know, raging against when we're talking about metaflammation and inflammatory signaling known as inflamma-aging.

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Yeah. And what, what percent of mood disorders do you think have metaflammation?

Oh my gosh. 90%.

Yeah. So you're like me, I don't want to ever say 100% because someone's going to come with one case or whatever.

Yeah. There's this one person. Yeah.

You know, it's true. And, and then also it inflames the hypothalamus. Which then causes insulin resistance and leptin resistance and low thyroid and low hormones, low growth hormone. And but the tests we have show those are normal, you know. And or you check person's estrogen level, normal is 0 to something, right?

Like, what, what?

You know, it's, it's crazy. And I don't know, for somebody you were talking, I'm like, I'm thinking like are we devolving, devo, whatever, is that we have all this information, but what is standard medicine doing?

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, when you look at it, if you think about, you know, you mentioned statins, and, you know, like, look, whether you think, whatever you think about statins, I'm not here to like bash or embellish a statin, uh, because there's people that aren't going to take care of themselves that a statin probably helps them more than hurts them if they're not going to take care of themselves in any other way, shape, or form. Because it's an anti-inflammatory. It reduces damaging lipid compounds in the body. So from that standpoint, statins aren't really known— if you talk to it, you know, docs, they go, well, statins, who cares about the cholesterol? It's decreasing all the inflammatory signaling that affects the, the vessel.

But it also affects mitochondrial function.

Well, I'm not saying it's good. There's, there's always a risk with the reward.

Everything's a trade-off.

Yeah, there's always a trade-off because the thing about a statin. And, you know, I remember when I first broke the story on statins and CoQ10. I wrote an article, and I think it was Drug Topics or Drugstore News.

Really? You're the one who said, hey, by the way—

well, yeah, I was one of the ones I wrote. We wrote the— we really wrote the handbook on drug-induced nutrient depletion.

I'm surprised you're still alive.

I'm Italian.

You knew someone to protect her.

Yeah. So it was interesting because when I, when I wrote this, there was a rebuttal that got published and it was by Pfizer, by a Pfizer chemist. They're like, there's no evidence of this. This is irresponsible for you to print this as a— right. And then it was funny because my response was, because I got to rebut the rebut, I listed a patent number and the patent number was the patent that Pfizer held for CoQ10. And lovastatin combined. And I was like, well gee, I'm just going off of your science and patents. And man, I didn't get another letter because I got a warning letter from them. You're going to continue to talk this way, you know.

Really?

Oh, it was funny. It was like I got lit up and I just went, you used your own data to show and I have to—

I'm getting threatened. So anyway, that's the way I think, Farber.

Well, you know, from my end, when I was talking about drug-induced nutrient depletions, everybody thought I had two, two, you know, two heads. You know, I was like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, these are miracle drugs. They're all miracles.

Yeah, it's all beautiful. But yet at the same time, there's these black box warnings. For example, if you take a proton pump inhibitor, there's a black box warning that it depletes magnesium and vitamin D. Yeah, it's only in one person. But then, but, you know, but, but literally I think though, that's why when I try to talk to folks about their global health, you got to take into account not just the drugs you're on today, but were you on, say, for example, you're a woman, are you on oral contraceptives for 15 years? Changes your microbiome. Oh, changes your mitochondrial energetics. Ask how many women that take an oral contraceptive if they lost any weight on it.

Oh yeah, they say it's weight neutral.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, you talk to somebody in the real world to go, yeah, I was weight neutral 15 pounds.

I can almost— yeah, one of our staff members was skinny Asian, uh, medical assistant, and she got a, a, uh, Depo-Provera shot. Oh wow. And I swore I could see her growing as I was watching her. Yeah, you know, and it's the whole thing, calories in, calories out. No.

Well, that one, we— yeah, that's a crazy one because we, we did this whole program with Lifetime Fitness on about 240,000 lives actually, where we taught them that weight loss was more than calories in, calories out. And what we did, we did a survey and a lab test. So the survey was, answer these questions, are you stressed out? Answer these questions, are you— is your thyroid off? Answer these questions, is your gut off? You know, you know, where are you metabolically broke? Let's give you a nutrient to neutralize that. No, by the way, let's look at your labs and see, you know, is your, you know, like your blood sugar is 95, the doctor pats you on the back. Well, you're a 60% risk of being diabetic at a blood sugar of 95. One point for it, you get 6% risk for every point over 84, right? So people were walking around with these, and we're not putting them on diets that are appropriate for that 95. So we did that with, uh, Lifetime Fitness.

Or their blood sugar is fine, but their insulin is sky high.

I had that today.

Give them insulin.

Exactly, exactly.

Something to boost insulin.

Yeah, so it's a real— it's really interesting that, that when you talk about global, you know, metabolic dysfunction, I don't think people are quite there yet. I mean, one of the reasons we developed the Metabolic Code platform was to take lab values that all doctors are familiar with: insulin, cystatin, LDL particle number, oxidized LDL, homocysteine, all the inflammatory markers, maybe a little deoxyguanosine, you know, stretch them a little bit, get them a little out there with maybe beta-2 microglobulin, those kind of things. But things that you could get at any major lab and say, here's what's showing for your metabolic processes if you're the patient, and here's what you can do about it. And, you know, one of the things, you know, over the last 5 years is understanding that, you know, people are really broken. Sometimes you're pushing upstream so hard to get them back to neutral. It's kind of why I thought that I liked peptides, because to me, peptides helped people to regain the normalcy of homeostasis and signaling in their body so they could take that inflammatory process that's supposed to get downgraded and back to normal, like, much like Naviaux's concept of the cell danger response signaling concept. And turn that off so that they can repair again. And I think that that's what I thought was so novel and intriguing. And look, I mean, it's not like peptides is a dirty word. There's 150 peptides, I think, in the pharma pipeline. So I mean, you know, we know about a third of the best.

Yeah.

And it's like a cast, like people say, well, you know, or it's even like thyroid when people say, well, it's not really a thyroid problem. They're right. It's a metabolic problem, but the body's not getting thyroid. So, and they say, well, fix the, the problem. Well, I can't fix the problem without thyroid.

And so it's kind of—

I say it's like a cast, you know, and when you're better, you can go off of it, you know.

That's right.

Um, that's right. No, they feel good, but, um, it, it is—

it's really, uh, I don't know, the whole dogma of, uh, you know, well, don't do this, you can't because it's not due to that. Well, okay, but it's still a problem. Your thyroid's actually fine, that's not the problem, it's the cells. It's like, it's like, uh, insulin resistance, thyroid resistance.

Well, you know, I've always said, like, when I wrote the— my, my— in The Metabolic Code, I took a big chance, and I think it was a little bit about before its time. I talked about receptors in the first—

watch out about before your time, it's timing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've learned, uh, that's— I, I— now I do my books in crayon. It works way better. Uh, it's—

for doctors, you gotta like write slow.

But I— but, but it's not about the hormones you're giving, it's about the receptor's ability to hear the hormone that you're giving. And if you cannot get that receptor to wake up— and a lot of times the mistake people do, especially in the hormone area, right, where they hammer people with a lot of testosterone or You know, they create tachyphylaxis. They just freeze that receptor, you know. It's about—

they down, down-regulate it. Now, you know, although it's like, you know, elderly people like yourself— no, I'm kidding.

Yeah, no, you call me grandpa, or no, just Papa.

You look younger than me, it pisses me off. Um, but, uh, it's like, so they have a testosterone resistance, and— but they allow the level to be like like lower than a woman, and they say that's fine. The guy has erectile dysfunction, he can't get off the couch, he's grumpy old man syndrome. And but their testosterone may be 700, like, like, great. And but they have all the symptoms. So I'm like, okay, let's give a therapeutic trial, give it a shot. They're like, oh my God, my life has changed. But, you know, I, I had a horrible medicine according to a lot of people.

Yeah, and, and I think it's interesting because you— it goes both ways, right? Because I'll get a 40-year-old who thinks they need a ton of testosterone, and really what it is, they're stressed out. Their free cortisol has shut down their, their gonadotropin-releasing hormone, and so they're not making enough because it's their HPA axis. And that's where things, you know, I think are interesting, like Kisspeptin, for example. Really great at helping to reinvigorate that ability to say, hey, yeah, that's right, I'm supposed to make testosterone, right?

Okay, can you just mention what Kisspeptin does?

Yeah, so Kisspeptin is a, is a peptide, and basically it's a gonadotropin-releasing hormone support. It literally triggers you to kind of start making your hormones again. And I think that it's really important because that's what I think is what's really happening when people get metabolically inflamed is you're shutting down things like growth hormone, releasing hormone, you're shutting down gonadotropin-releasing hormone, you're shutting down your— when you get under metabolic stress and insulin resistance, you shut down your thymus's ability to make mature thymus T killer cells. And so when you—

and then that's a vicious cycle too.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I really think that, you know, in the end as we start to work with people, it's about that reinvigoration process that you have to do. And you have to take into account, you know, where's their gut at, where's their brain at, what's going on with the relationship between these organ systems. And hormones are— they're just important, man. You know, if you want to age quick, make a lot of stress hormones and a lot of insulin. That'll age you really quick.

Oh yeah, yeah. And it's true. I mean, you've seen it. I mean, I have kids coming in 22, 25, 28, their testosterone level is like a 90-year-old.

See it all the time. It's really sad.

I hesitate. I don't want to give them testosterone like you were saying. I want to fix the other stuff. Yeah, be easy, just give them a big slug of testosterone, but I don't think that's really the long-term solution, you know.

I couldn't agree the more. I mean, I, I see it so often, especially in You know, you think about it. So I brought my son out here. We moved out here about 10 years ago, you know, and out here, man, if you're playing baseball and football, it's serious. I mean, you're playing baseball year round. Football's tough. And I would know parents who would have their kids going to a baseball practice, then a football practice, then to their coach because they thought that a child was just a little version of an adult. And that's not the case. You can't stress a child with that much workload and not expect to see some changes. And they wondered why they weren't growing. And, and I literally would— yeah, right. And I— so I would literally have to get them to understand that, look, I know you feel that like little Johnny or Susie's going to make the Olympics or be a professional athlete, but you know what, they're only 10. Uh, you know, maybe they don't—

pressure, you know, and that's why—

add that, yeah, add the stress to it too, right? And so what I see a lot are, you know, my 22-year-old professional athletes, which the ones that kind of manage the way they train and don't overdo it, and they've got great strength coaches that are working them, their testosterone tend to be pretty good still, you know. But in the ones that are just overtrained Their testosterone's are low.

Overtraining is a huge problem.

It's a huge problem in people that aren't even athletes, right? I mean, everything— this is, this is kind of my pet peeve, honestly, because I have a lot of people that they, they go to a trainer and they want to do the, the workout that a pro athlete does. And my first answer to them is, well, are you a pro athlete? Uh, uh, no, you're You're damn skippy you're not, and there's a reason you're not. It isn't how much muscle you have on your body, it's the fact that their nervous system is more efficient than yours. They reset the trauma of inflammation and excessive sympathetic tone quicker and with more elegance in repair than you do. And so, you know, you people start getting into all kind of conduction problems with their heart, they get anxiety, they get They start to break.

That's what I'm on right now. I'm on the overtraining prevention program.

But you know what? You're storing up bonus points right now.

You're making up— but I'm religious about working out. I go religiously every 4 months for 8 minutes.

That's very much— that's very Hahnemannian of you. It's very homeopathic. That's good.

Uh, yeah.

But it does make a difference. And, and, and so I think when we see people that are already stressed out at work and then they're going in there training for their Tough Mudder or they're training for their Spartan Race— and believe me, I want people to achieve their goals—

or crazy about it, right? Like, oh my God, it's worse. And I've also had, like, I remember this was a couple years ago, but, uh, brought in for short stature and I mean, the kid was older, but it was like, I look and the kid's like 6'4", right? And I'm like, and they're like, well, he's gonna make a lot more money if he's a center rather than the power forward, you know, can you give him growth? I'm like, no, you know. Right. But he's probably right, right? It's like, you know, it's millions of dollars difference, but—

Well, I'm surprised that they didn't have you, you know, break his legs and extend his bones, you know?

Oh.

I—

yeah, especially in the Asian, uh, communities do that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So I mean, I think it's important.

I'm thinking about doing that. Well, yeah, we were thinking about when you were talking about the transgender, like, my mom was smoking 5 packs a day when she was pregnant, doing Adderall to keep her weight down. I was born at 6 months, so, uh, uh, I was supposed to be retarded or not live.

Or not have any lungs.

Yeah, well, one out of two ain't bad, you know. But, uh, yeah, it's— I could have, could have been like 6'4", full head of hair and everything.

That's what I thought you were. I guess I can't tell from the chair. I mean, I'm sure you—

hey, thank God for Hair Formulas, you know, with peptides, you know.

Exactly. So I mean, I think the, the big— I guess for me, the big interest is, is that How do we start to look at these? Now, obviously I understand, you know, the, the advantages of ipamorelin and semorelin and the whole family of the GHRP and GHRA.

Can you just explain those just a little bit?

Well, yeah. So these things, sure. So, you know, these other peptide compounds that, you know, have obviously been popular for quite a while are compounds that either help your, your growth hormone receptors to awaken or tells your brain that you need to release growth hormone. Because as you age, or if you're under a lot of stress, you got plenty to release out of your pituitary, you just don't release it. And so there's peptides that can help you to endogenously— instead of injecting growth hormone, right, you, you just help your body release your own, do its own.

Yeah, let it.

And that to me helps to reset what you're supposed to be doing. Uh, and I think that's why I, I, I valued, um, you know, doing the research on peptides. I've got a— actually, I've got a little handbook coming out on, on peptides that I wrote kind of in our spare time.

Uh, what do you spare time? Yeah, I wrote that.

Well, you know, some people, some people have issues, Kent.

I'm one of them. They're right.

It could be worse.

Yeah, exactly. So, so, so, you know, when you think of the value of, you know, what these signal compounds do, I really believe they're strategic because as people get more and more disrupted in that meta-inflammatory state, we have to try to bring everything we can to get them back out of that state. So that they can repair their tissues again, because you're only doing one of two things. You're either repairing or you're breaking down. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you're repairing or you're— it's either destructive or it's in homeostasis and repair. And, you know, that's a big issue. And when you combine that with, in general, you know, people eat too much, they eat too often, they eat too late, they pick the wrong foods, they don't get enough sleep. And they're under a lot of stress. You don't know anybody like that. Come on.

What are you talking about?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, you layer that on because why that's important is that starts to disrupt your circadian rhythm of your hormones, right? That's the other thing that people need to understand is as you get kind of metabolically inflamed and you're pumping out more cortisol and your cortisol curve is staying flat instead of having a nice pattern to it, all your hormone signaling starts to get screwed up. So for example, if my cortisol is high enough and I don't go into deep wave sleep, right? We're supposed to go into deep wave sleep to tell our neurochemical buckets to get refilled so that we've got the chemicals in our brain to signal the next day that, hey, I'm alert, I'm ready to go. If you are pumping out enough of that corticotropin-releasing hormone, which remember when you're under neuroinflammation, you keep pumping that stuff out, that blocks melatonin. Now, not only does that block melatonin release, it blocks growth hormone release. And not only does it block growth hormone release, and look, melatonin is super protective for your brain as you're aging, right?

Oh yeah, yeah.

And it's protective for your kidneys and it's protective for your intestine. But the big thing people don't understand is when you disrupt melatonin signaling at night, your insulin function the whole following day is disrupted. So you don't release appropriate insulin from your beta cells, which is a part of your pancreas. And when you don't release insulin appropriately, the number one most inflammatory thing in your body that goes on is when your blood sugar goes up and you can't appropriately use it. So the higher you spike your blood sugar, yeah, the biggest inflammatory event in your body is a high postprandial blood sugar. And so you start to see how all of this is playing together.

Yeah, you know what, I'm just thinking, that's what the studies show. It's that if you can stop that peak, the average, okay, it matters, but not nearly as much as that peak.

That's exactly right. Hence, when you start to look at other peptides like, well, they're out there, right? Liraglutide. Liraglutide is a peptide, right? And it's a drug. It's a drug. It's used by diabetics. So why is it working? It's working because it's blunting that peak and it's causing a better insulin signal so that you normalize that. And, and But the point to it is, is that all these hormones are interconnected and it starts at the brain. And when you don't take into account those pieces of going upstream, you end up being a person with diabetes that— because they've showed this— you can normalize their glucose with a med, you can give them a statin, you can give them an antihypertensive drug, and they still end up with renovascular disorders, elevated uric acid problems.

Picking out the markers, not the underlying problem.

Exactly.

Yeah. Or it's like, you know, you look at the people with sleep apnea, you know, they just never get— or, or I remember it was like, uh, just a few weeks ago, even at a PowerPoint due, and Course, you always think it's gonna take an hour, and I stayed awake basically 2 days, and oh my God, I was so hungry, and I gained 8 pounds in 2 days, you know, and it's, it's crazy. And yeah, and, and I get just like, all of a sudden I get energy at like midnight, you know, and I'm like, yeah, you totally flip your cortisol curve, right? Yeah, so I'm do as I say, not as I do, but, um Yeah, no, it, it's— sleep is huge, but I try to ignore it and take peptides to try to counteract it. But I don't recommend that to anyone. But, um, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting. It's like clockwork. You look at people that sleep apnea and then they gain weight. The body just, you know, they get insulin resistance immediately, hypertension. I mean, just wrecking their blood vessels. And then now they gain more weight, they can't sleep, and then, you know, just— it's a, it's a death sentence, you know?

Yeah. And I think a lot of people, once again, you know, when you think of, oh, I'm having trouble sleeping, I'll take a sleeping pill. Well, you know, really, insomnia is a disorder of hyperarousal, meaning that your brain took on too much stress during the day and it can't unload it at night. Now, why is that so important? Well, when you take on all that sympathetic tone, what happens to your thymus? You, you don't make T killer cells. They don't mature. You get adolescent T killer cells. So what that means for people listening is you don't have enough active T killer cells. So, and T killer cells are what go out there and patrol and attach to things that don't belong in your body and knock them out. And so when you think of— when I work on people for their sleep and you think of things like DSIP, delta sleep-inducing peptide, that's one that, that is popular on the peptide front for helping to get people back into signaling their sleep, as well as just using— once again, I talked about the, like, the growth hormone supportive ones like ipamorelin or semorelin or any of the other agents.

You know where delta sleep-inducing peptide is the highest?

In the gut. It's interesting, you're talking about, you know, it's always got great anti-inflammatory, it lowers the inflammation in the hypothalamus, and is actually secreted by the mother, which makes sense, right? And, uh, and basically the baby ingests it, so it's actually orally active. Um, which— it's not a small peptide, but it's the composition. It's orally active. It's very interesting. It's very anti-inflammatory. Um, and it's not a sleep med. You think Delta Sleep, you take it, you sleep. Doesn't work like that. Um, it kind of resets or lowers the inflammation. And we'll see people, you know, their diabetes gets better, whether it's from the sleep, but I think it's also from that reduction in hypothalamic inflammation. Then you add— we love it with KPV, which is a melanocortin, um, uh, which, uh, people use like Melanotan with the Barbie doll peptide. So you get tan, you lose weight, and you increase libido. Um, but the little fragment of it is actually more anti-inflammatory but doesn't stimulate the melanocytes. But, um, and they seem to work on that, right?

Yeah, because what, what, you know, when people get, you know, biotoxin illness or they get Lyme or Lyme-related illnesses, any of that family of, of, uh, you know, vectors, they lose their, their, their melanocyte-stimulating hormone. You know, it just tanks. And, and once you do that, you just have to remember In a chronically inflamed state, when you're sympathetic dominant and you're not sleeping, you lose all that signaling and your parasympathetic tone. So sympathetic, fight or flight, parasympathetic, no, it's not. And when you're not nourishing the body with phospholipids and you're not building acetylcholine in your brain, you can't get that balance back as easily. And that's kind of what's interesting on the advent of a lot of the, you know, the peptides that relate to cognitive function. They're every bit as important in terms of repair of this lipid membrane and then also allowing to get rid of the inflammation. Because when your brain is inflamed, when you're making a lot of cortisol and you're, and you're making a lot of something called NMDA, which is a, which, which is a compound in your brain, is that if you're making too much of it, you're excitatory. When you make a lot of that you block your stem cells that make your neurons. So you don't get dendritic rebudding. And that means that, yeah, you're not regenerating your, your neurons in your brain.

And you're getting dumber.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you're— when— yeah, when you know, like me, when you're, uh, you know, when you're the grandchild of a bricklayer, you can't afford to lose that. You gotta, you gotta keep working.

I, I think you're fine. Um, yeah. And the, you know, the meds out there that block that NMDA receptor You know, there's the Namenda and ketamine, right? And actually the cough medicine. I'm blanking out, but rifenicin? No, dexamethorphan.

Dexamethorphan. Yeah.

Yeah. But it shows that, I mean, they're very different acting. So it shows like we always like try to put one thing on one receptor, right?

Right.

And it matters where in the brain. I mean, if you activate this part of the brain, it does different than this part of the brain, you know.

Yeah, that's why, like, when I did all the work on, uh, the intranasal ginsenoside R3, uh, which I did all the kind of discovery work on that, and we created that intranasal application of ginsenoside R3. You know, I, I was— that's— I did— that was like 15 years ago when I did that, because I had this notion when we were working—

we had to talk about ahead of your time.

Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm, I think I'm a little bit, uh, maybe cursed by that in a lot of ways. No, personally, it's not commercially smart, but I don't care. I like, I like—

that's like we with the beer, like we, you know, with the energy beer, no one ever heard of like, why do I want energy beer? And then 5 years later it was like, oh, Red Bull, and like, like we were criticized for being stupid, you know?

Exactly. So I mean, the big thing for us was looking at that whole thing of the brain and going, well, what's really going on? Well, we're getting, you know, the immune cells of the brain are getting fired up, the microglial cells are getting fired up, and it's causing the release of inflammatory oxidative damage. So all these, you know, pro-oxidants, the thromboxanes, the prostaglandins, the, you know, superoxide and hydrogen peroxide anions get upregulated, you kill the neuron. The neurons are all getting destroyed, then they release— when they die, they release a bunch of proteins that then trigger more microglial cells, and it's this vicious cycle. And I just— why I think it's so important that, you know, this other area of hope with peptides in the brain is that it really gives us a way to think about how we neutralize that process that most people are in, which is a chronic neuroinflammatory stance.

I mean, yeah.

And at least get them to a baseline where they can even think, you know?

And I mean, there are some people who are just so like, they're just stressed out. They're not thinking clearly. They can't handle stress. When I had Lyme, it would just be any over the phone ring. I'm like, how dare these people call at 2 in the afternoon? You know, it's like, it just like fight or flight, anything like what? You know, exactly. It's the brain's just on fire and just ready to go, and you can't live like that, you know.

No, you can't. And I, you know, I think when I, when I think of, uh, metaflammation, what I always try to go back to is that thought process of it's from the brain down and from the gut up, you know. It's, you know, you can, you can have a perfectly beautiful brain And if you get gut permeability changes because maybe you had a head trauma, right? So if you hit your head, within 10 minutes you've got a leaky gut.

In the gut, isn't that amazing? Just like, yeah, so it's a bi-directional. The brain affects the gut and tells it, you know, what to do. So it's just kind of like SIBO. I remember I was on a SIBO conference and they said, well, I think it's a symptom more than a cause. Like, oh, you're kicked off the conference, you know.

And, uh, 157.

Yeah. And, and it's true. Well, so many things are like that. They're both a symptom and a cause, you know, because it's a vicious cycle.

And it interrupts the cycle. Yeah, it's, it's like I always liken it to a circuit board, you know. You, if you have a, if you have a light out, you go over to the light switch and go, I'm going to turn the light on, and you turn the light on and nothing happens, and you go, oh Well, I wonder if I kicked the plug. I'm gonna go plug it in. And you, and you're looking up, now the plug's in, the light bulb's, you know, not burned out, but I can't see that it's turning on. Oh, I'm gonna go look out at the circuit breaker box. And lo and behold, the circuit breaker box got flipped. And until you turn that circuit breaker box, click that switch back on, the juice doesn't flow back to the light bulb and light things up. That's what's going on with your signaling in your body everywhere, right? They're bio circuits, and you're either sending information through those bio circuits that's keeping everything moving, absorbing, metabolizing, detoxifying, generating energy, or they're short circuits and you have to create, you know, countermeasures and corrections. And, you know, I think that, that when I, when I think of, you know, BPC-157, right? What an amazing compound. Now, and I remember when my, my son got injured and had a Lisfranc injury. So if you're not familiar with the Lisfranc injury out there, it's a, it's a ligament between your toes that, that because of a twerking industry injury on the field, the bone basically goes up like a razor blade and cuts the ligament. And now you can't pivot on your foot. You can't land on your foot. It's excruciatingly painful. It's a very common injury in the NFL. Uh, and, uh, my son had that and, uh, it's supposed to take 18 months to repair from that. Well, what we did at the time was used BPC-157 and used, uh, TB4. And, uh, we literally, first of all, he had no swelling, which is unheard of. They couldn't find the tear when they— they took them 5 sets of imaging to find where the tear even was. And then within 5 months after the injury, he was putting full force spinning on that foot at the California State Championships to win the discus. And it repaired it in a third of the time. Uh, and I, I think it's, it's incredible what the potential is for peptide research and therapy, because I've seen so many interesting outcomes and personally experienced those. And, you know, watching him, I think people have to see it personally.

Now, with your son playing football, I mean, you know, nowadays these kids are so freaking big and fast, and just the inertia of Kraken, what, what do you feel about— do you give them anything for prevention of traumatic brain injury, or your thoughts on it?

Well, yeah, I give them everything I'm allowed to give them. You know, it's very— you know, peptides are kind of, you know, they're not allowed in collegiate or professional sports.

Well, uh, which ones?

BPC is okay. BPC is okay. But any of the— actually, the thymus ones, they, you know, aren't there, and obviously the growth hormone ones aren't there. Yeah, so, but the point is, for him, yeah, I use the high-resolving fish oils on them to kind of have that high-resolving load in his brain at all times. He uses the Synapsin nasal spray.

Oh yeah, yeah, even flavonoids, even progesterone, you know.

We've got him going on the bioflavonoids. He's doing magnesium, really protective. And I also think it's interesting that—

let me ask you real quick, magnesium, um, Does it matter what type?

Yeah, it does matter. In fact, if it— you know, I like magnesium glycinate. Uh, if you're going for getting rid of muscle aches, I like the magnesium malate, you know, so it's more for muscle. Uh, if they're trying to like help arrhythmias or with cardiac function, you think of magnesium tarate. Uh, so those are the 3 magnesiums I usually use. You can use Mag 3 and 8 if you're more concerned about neurologic issues or crossing the blood-brain barrier. Yeah, if you're You won't get as much tissue level of magnesium because it's only, you know, it's 5% magnesium, right? You have to take a ton of it to get that mag—

That's the thing. I mean, that's so big.

Yeah.

But I think the reason I brought that up was that it's not just taking, you know, magnesium or people look at the bottle. Oh, this has more, you know, uh, basically just elemental mag—

Yeah, like mag oxide.

Yeah. Like, okay. You know? Yeah. You're just going to poop your pants. But yeah.

Yeah. But I think it's interesting because I think like we're discovering now that there's these hero genes that athletes have that may make them more protective. So, you know, when I talk to a lot of Hall of Famers, everybody goes, oh, so you're working on your brain, huh? And I go, you know what? Most of the Hall of Famers I met that even played in the '60s and '70s that didn't have any you know, that much padding on their head. These guys are really with it and sharp, and they played a lot of games. And maybe it was those hero genes that actually protected them and allowed them to play the game at a very high level for a long time and get them into the Hall of Fame.

Or maybe the middle linebacker weighed 150 pounds. Well, there—

I'll tell you what, man, I've been around slow as crap. They were pretty big still. I'll tell you what. I mean, they weren't little. But I think it's interesting that we see that there may be these kind of in various sports, these maybe genetic predisposed advantages that limit maybe risk of injury, maybe risk of head trauma. I mean, I know guys that have 3 or 4 concussions, 5 concussions. I had one guy I worked at had 14 concussions. All right. And, you know, my son has played ball at a very high level since he's, you know, 8 years old. He hasn't had a single concussion and no signs of ever having it. So it may be that he's just a chip off the old block and he's got the Rockhead Rock there, you know, that's, uh, that's saving him. But it's, it's just interesting to me that we have to always watch because there's all this, you know, I work some with some special forces guys too here and there. Uh, and you know, they're, they're getting a different breed, man. Yeah, but they're getting exposed to stuff and they're, you know, getting hit and they're, you know, and even for them, as awesome as they are, you know, there's always that risk of vulnerability depending on the amount of allostatic load that takes place. And, and I think across the board you've seen executives that push themselves so hard that one day they woke up and they broke. Yeah.

Oh, like overtraining.

I know, I was thinking of the Special Forces, like, I mean, they're in freezing cold. I mean, I have a temperature tolerance of like 2 degrees, you know. It's like, I can't— freezing, like, give me the heat pads, you know.

Um, but, uh, uh, yeah, we've had, um, uh, like, just a bunch more of, uh, executive overtraining syndrome, just overstressed, you know, and they just boom, it just sets everything off. Their immune system is shot, you know, whether or not they have underlying Lyme. But I really think when they say Lyme disease, it's— I think most people that get Lyme, I think it's so prevalent, are fine. It's if you get all this other stuff, you know.

I could not agree with you more. When you're— once again, I'll go back to what we talked about at the very beginning. When you're metabolically inflamed. When you, you know, maybe your diet was bad, maybe you had a lot of drug therapy when you were a kid, maybe you didn't sleep well, and maybe you were undernourished. You know, I mean, you, you, you're, you're in this predisposition where you get the bug and you decompensate and somebody else gets the bug and they're fine. And, you know, it, it's like I said, I think the big takeaways for me is, is regulating people's sleep patterns. Really working at getting their brain to shut off at night and manage the sympathetic dominance of today.

If you have a trick for that, I need that.

Yeah.

And then, you know, if you can get that going, manage their cortisol. And you know, the big thing, like, people go, how do you know I have high cortisol? Well, yeah, you can measure it, but are you craving carbs at night? Are you coming home from a day of work and hugging your potato chip bag?

If you are, you're probably under excessive stress because I pushed my wife out of the way and then I grabbed the potato chips. Um, yeah, but, uh, yeah, no, it's, yeah, it's, it's nuts. And like, I think about when I— so I like how I kind of got into this. I had basically chronic fatigue syndrome before it was called chronic fatigue syndrome, like One pupil was bigger than the other growing up, and, um, uh, all like one arm would stop working, whatever, you know. And but then so I treated myself with thyroid, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm, I'm good. We opened the Fibromyalgia Fatigue Center, 22 centers. And then all of a sudden I went through a stressful, stressful divorce and just boom, bedbound, just sweats like crazy. I mean, it was just crazy. And then I was— at that time, we were in the mode of massive antibiotics. You know, I was doing 7 antibiotics at a time at 4 times those I never give a patient.

It—

for 3 and a half years, never worked. Went to heart failure, um, and the cardiologist goes, well, maybe you'll get 10% better in 10 years. I'm like, what? I mean, I could not stand up straight, and I could not— it would take me an hour to walk up the stairs. I'm like, Wow. Just shoot me. I can't live like this, you know. Right. And then a year later, after I went in Europe, found peptides, um, you know, uh, lifesaver. I mean, I'd say that was the biggest thing for you.

What was the big, the big ones that kind of you feel are your game changers that, um, you remember, you go, wow, that, that was the inflection point for me.

Yeah, so it was, uh, thymosin beta-4 and BPC. Um, let's see, I was doing a little— the growth hormone releasing hormone. My sense is that wasn't the major thing. But you— now you look at the studies and it shows that those—

thymosin beta-4, I mean, that there's all kinds of big, you know, stem cells, exosomes certainly help, ozone Love it, love it.

Um, I mean, there's so many things that work. Um, but it was funny, you know, and I walk into the cardiologist— walk in the cardiologist's office and he's like, you look pretty good. And, uh, I'm like, yeah. He goes, okay. Like, didn't ask, oh, what have you been doing? Or, you know, it's just—

well, no, it's a miracle. It's an idiopathic spontaneous—

yeah, he goes, oh, I guess I was wrong.

Yeah, you know. So it's something else.

Yeah, it's a— it's an amazing journey that you take, uh, learning this work and, uh, just helping people and helping yourself, right? I mean, I did, you know, I had the same kind of issues that really needed to repair. And, uh, unfortunately we're still not getting enough information out there about what steps can you take in order to begin to really grab that that person who's on a rapid train to accelerated aging. We're still not talking about that. We're still looking for that magic bullet that's going to be like the ageless pill. And in the end, we're not giving enough credit to the fact that you have all these body systems communicating with each other, working at trying to create either health or slowly eroding you. You're going down the drain just a little bit at a time. And it— or fast, right? And we just haven't— we haven't done enough education that, that we really get, you know, individual out there can go, wow, I have a chance, I can do something. And I think that's where we need to move. That's why I'm grateful you're doing this Peptide Summit, because, you know, you're going to learn tremendous, tremendous things from, you know, everything that you've got to offer them and all the, all the guests that you've got. It's going to be, you know, at least get people thinking.

Yeah. And it is interesting though, is that people have the mindset, I don't want to pay for my healthcare, you know. But I remember being sick, it's like, like, God, I'm kind of an atheist, but God, you know, I know there's a female God because she hates me. But that, you know, I said, take everything, a good divorce settlement, is that You know, you— nothing matters when you're that sick. And, uh, and, and so basically I said, you know, take everything. Well, God did give that. I got divorced and got everything taken. But, um, so, uh, but it is— it's just I cherish, you know, not always—

I shouldn't complain, but I do complain.

But it's like, damn, I realize how bad it can be. You It doesn't matter what you have, like, oh, I want this new TV. I want this new car. When you're sick, it doesn't mean squat. You don't care. You know? Yeah, try staying up while you can't sleep, you can't function. You've got, you know, I remember just taking a shower and a bath 100 times because of the pain, the restless legs, and the neuropathy, and the allodynia, where you touch my skin, I'm like, I, I'm gonna end it, you know. And like, wait a minute, I can't do that because I'm treating this shit, you know. And but I knew I had it, I was a bad case because I had it from birth. Um, but you were also talking about how people are different, and we, um, we lost our tech, but we had a mirror, uh, a microscope with immunofluorescing antibodies, and we could see, you know, Basically Borrelia, Babesia, their whole family that would come down. Sweetest families, the Sweetest family. They were farmers, dairy farmers, all just sick with Lyme and Babesia, except the dad was great. He was like working out. And we look at all the blood, he has more Babesia than anyone and he's fine. He's just like, oh yeah, can you give me some of the growth hormone booster? Because I want to, you know I'm only benching this and that.

And you try one more.

Yeah. And, uh, it was amazing.

Uh, well, you know, I think it goes back to that story of the, you know, the terrain is everything, right? That's that— it's the terrain that everything is brewing in that matters. That the terrain will control the bugs, you know.

I, I think it's true. And that's where I kind of, because of my own experience, you know, I I'm very ADD and I want to like get it now, so let's just do higher dose antibiotics. And I found to get from point A to B— antibiotics have their place, they have their place— but if my natural killer cell function was, was between 0 and 2, right? So you can never kill the bug enough for it to take over.

That's right.

So unless you get that up, it's worthless to do all those things. Um, and I remember I went and had parotid gland inflammation. You couldn't see it, but it would just be spasms and just kill me. So with ENT, and he's like, yeah, you got inflammation, probably infection, take antibiotics. I'm like, I'm on 7 IV, would you like me to take more? Uh, you know, and I remember being in, in the ICU and the nurses outside the, the little curtain saying, this is the the AIDS patient that won't admit it. He keeps testing negative. You know, it's like, uh, it just— I got more stories from hospitals. But, um, yeah, it's like health is everything. Yeah.

I mean, I think in the end, um, I always tell people, you know, your health is work, but it's worth it because it's like you said, doesn't matter what you're riding around in, it doesn't matter how cool your refrigerator is, it doesn't matter, you know, how big your TV is. In the end If you can, if you can manage and learn to develop a lifestyle, and I'm— because I'm big on teaching people, you know, you gotta, you gotta do this day in and day out, you know.

You can't just— I'm kind of all or none in my personality. It's just like I live in this office like for days and days and I don't get out. I don't do the exercise. I'm like, you know, you're typical. I'm So I don't preach to patients about exercise, or, um, but then, you know, you go and you go, I'm gonna do this every day, and then, yeah, a month later I'm like, I gotta get back there, you know.

Yeah, I think it's just a— it's a— it's that piece of the more consistent I can just get people to do. I want them to go have fun, man. Go to— go out, go to the party, enjoy your celebrations, you know, do all that. But on your day in and day out basis What are you going to do? You know, you got— you, you've got to take control of understanding that insulin piece where your, your glucose is going up and it— you're not, you're not getting that spike under control. You're damaging your tissues, you're damaging your brain, you're damaging your arteries, you're damaging your kidneys. I mean, just think how many people you see now in their 50s that have low kidney filtration. Yeah, they're GFR low. They're, they're already under excessive oxidative stress in their kidneys. And until we start to get— you know, that's why I spend time.

But it's normal, and they won't treat it until you're in failure.

Well, that's— I mean, it was funny. I, I've really been a student of this whole— the problems of all things glucose for quite a while. And, uh, you know, it's funny because people will say, well, you know, yeah, you should— I actually listened to a telehealth, you know, a little recording for this friend of mine's son. And it was like, well, yeah, your glucose is 96. That's fine. Your triglycerides are elevated, but they're not too elevated. And oh yeah, your hemoglobin 16.7. No, it's within range. You're fine. And he said, you know, but in the end, what you really ought to do is you got to try to eat less fried food and get some exercise. Thanks. Bye. So it was like a 1.5-minute express—

God, I feel so motivated.

Yeah, right, exactly. And I think that that's where it's got to come from. You've got to begin to get that piece of— and I like— people love it when they come to me because I do give them a shot in the arm. But my— what I preach to them is you got to be your own motivator because you know what? In the end, I tell people this all the time. You know what, you're at work and you're working 100 hours a week, I got it. If you passed away, you'd probably have a little party for you and they talk about how nice—

what was that guy's name we had there?

Yeah, yeah, who was that? I can't even remember who was that guy, you know. So it's, it's like understanding that, you know, you're, you're not doing anybody a disservice except yourself when you don't take care of yourself and you don't understand that. And, and it's, it's important because that motivation does have to come from them. It can't come from an external source. And that, that, and, and to your point, sometimes you can't get them motivated unless you repair them a little bit and get their kind of their brain at least pumping out a little bit of serotonin, a little bit of dopamine. And so I, you kind of have to work with not pushing too hard and making sure that you're working on the, you know, this, this biochemical balance that gets them into that space.

Because they say, oh, it's psychological, but psychological is brain firing. It's like, I have a brother, we call him anti-Tony Robbins. You tell him to do something, he'll give you 1,000 reasons why he can't, you know. It's just exactly wired that way. Um, and it's exactly, it's, it's tough. But, uh, yeah, and, and you think you're like, you don't have time to do that. You don't have time not to. I mean, you make it up. You sleep better, you wake up better, you're more efficient. Again, and I'm being hypocritical here, but, um, I know what I need.

You're not going to be— now I'm going to be on you now, man. It's all trouble for you now. It's getting people, you know, it's just getting— look, I start people out saying, hey, can you walk 10 minutes a day for me? Can you at least walk to your mailbox and come back?

No, it's like Sorry, Dr. DeVos.

Can you wheel around in your chair around your room for me?

I can make it to the refrigerator in 12 steps and back.

Well, did you see— have you seen these? I've got a new one of these. These are weighted and they vibrate, so you actually can get exercise with your mouse while you're using it.

What?

Ha! Kidding.

I know, I thought of weird stuff to do. What was it?

I don't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that's just it. It's like, hey, look, you got to get up, you got to move, you got to try to get that.

No, and, and when I like don't sleep and stay up to finish a project, I feel like I've aged like years, you know.

It's hard. I mean, it literally is. And I think the older you get, the harder it gets. Like, when you get to my age, you'll understand, right? That's like— because I, I literally— it's funny, I've had to change and adapt the way I do things with each decade. Uh, because now that I'm 60, I go, wow, I gotta, you know, I, you know, I'm changing the way I work out. I'm changing, you know, how much I eat. I'm making sure I get my sleep. I'm, I'm just really just even more dedicated to just saying, hey, what, what, what, you know, I kind of like my life. I want to live as long as I can. I want to feel as good as I can while I'm alive. So I'm going to have to put in work because I don't know anybody that, you know, hey, oh yeah, I want to build a house, but I'm going to sit here and look at the bricks and I'm sure it's going to get built. Uh, it's, it's that—

hey, I, you know, I, I like that because it is—

it ain't gonna build itself.

Yeah, that's right, man. So when are you starting your exercise program? Tomorrow?

Um, next month? Maybe a week from Friday next year. All right, they're closed. See, I have an excuse. I learned from my brother.

They're closed sidewalks.

I don't have sidewalks on my street. There's two.

No room for a treadmill.

Uh, no, the kids are sleeping on it. It's a coat hanger. Where am I gonna hang my coats? You're awesome. This was great. Just learned a ton. You're just awesome to talk to, entertaining. And I'm going to come out and visit you. I'm a little scared now. You're going to put me on the straight and narrow or something. But—

Well, we have ways of convincing you.

Lecture shock.

Do you want to mention more about the Metabolic Code real quick? Or— Sure.

I mean, I'd invite people to look up, you know, look at the Metabolic Code platform and go to metaboliccode.com. And what the Metabolic Code does is it takes lab values, takes questions, takes biometrics, takes things like wearable data, pushes it all together and says, where are you metabolically broken? But it does it in an easy way because once again, when people— they get confused when they go to a doc who's doing all this stuff, like, I don't even know what they said. I mean, but I'm taking these pills and they told me to drink this green juice.

I don't even know why they're taking the pill. That's the case. I'm like, don't, you know.

Yeah. And so why we— how we developed it was to say there's 5 networks or circuits that we concern ourselves with. One is the adrenal thyroid pancreas circuit, right? Cortisol, glucose, and insulin, and thyroid hormone. That's a circuit. Cortisol goes up, thyroid goes down, insulin goes up. Cortisol goes up. It's understanding that relationship. That's the relationship of energy, right? When I— if I've got my cortisol, glucose, and thyroid dialed in, I've got energy, I'm not gaining weight. And when they're not dialed in, I'm gaining weight and I feel fatigued, right? So that's easy to communicate to people what's off in that circle, that triad of relationship. And then the second one is gut-immune-brain. Which everybody's reading about gut-immune-brain. And the fact of the matter is that if you get under enough stress, triad 1 could stack on triad 2, okay? And that could be, uh, you know, gut-immune-brain is, gee, I'm under a lot of stress, my gut gets leaky. If I got a lot of bugs in my gut that don't belong there due to using PPIs and everything else, my brain starts to get inflamed. and my immune system is the signaling in between it, right? That immune system is what's causing all the information to go back and forth and say inflamed or not. And these are all color-coded, so it's kind of like Garanimals meets systems biology medicine, right? So, you know, so that's, that's your resiliency. And the third is cardiopulmonary neurovascular. So if my, if my, if I'm under a lot of stress, and I lose my vagal tone and my blood vessels get stiff, my blood pressure goes up. And if my inflammation is high because of my immunity, my lipids are off. And then when I start to have that real loss of heart rate variability and I start to lose vagal tone, well, now I'm not breathing as deep. And when I don't breathe as deep, I don't oxygenate. So that's the, that's the triad of stamina and endurance There's 2 more. One is liver, lymph, kidney, which is the triad or the relationship of detox, right? And then the 5th is your hormones, and that's the triad of potency. So these 5 different buckets, all the information and labs flow into them and create a point score and says, this is where you should start. Start to fix this network first. Because what happens a lot of times is people go to, you know, some functional medicine docs and they're trying to fix everything at once instead of understanding that I need to order my repair so I can get to the next level of energetics within the person's body. That's right.

Is there a particular panel that you do to—

oh, it's pretty big. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty significant. It's got all the, you know, obviously has all the advanced lipids in it, you know, it's cortisol, salivary, urinary, uh, urinary hormones or serum hormones, all the markers related to MMP-9, melanocyte stimulating hormone, leptin if you want. All of the— it's a pretty comprehensive panel, looks at your white blood cells, looks at your differential, you know, things like mean platelet volume. Nobody even looks at mean platelet volume. And mean platelet volume, when it's high, is a primary signal that you're metabolically inflamed. Yeah, yeah, it's like a super important simple— it's cheap.

I gave B vitamins, didn't do anything.

Yeah, right, exactly. And so, so, yeah, so it's a, it's a, you know, pretty robust blood panel, about 170 questions. You put in blood pressure, you put in heart rate, you put in pH of saliva because pH matters. And then you, then you, uh, run it, runs it, and then it tethers all the information together. A good example would be, I got a blood sugar 95. So what? You're 60% risk. I got a blood sugar 95, an insulin of 18, my blood pressure is elevated, my kidney function is going down, and I'm making bad lipids, and my homocysteine is high. That person with a 95 is way farther along their trajectory of breaking their tissues down and being damaged.

Yeah, it's not the one value.

Yeah, so it tethers all of it together. Yeah, accelerates the data.

I'm really interested.

I think it's brilliant because, I mean, I love getting tons of tests, right? And, but, and I've learned over the years, like, you spot, like, there's no one test. You can always— if there's an error in the test or whatever Uh, it's like a stall, like overall picture, but you have taken that and then broken it down so like doctors don't need 5 years to understand it.

Yep, they can do it like that, honestly. A little bit of training and they, they got it. They're, they're swimming with the big dogs. They can, they can really start to look at metabolic dysfunction and start to say where, what circuitry, what systems network are the most stressed. And, you know, at first when I did it, everybody's like, oh, you know, you can't do it, you can't do it, you're not smart enough. Uh, and, and, oh no, I mean, honestly, it's like, hey, we're, you know, you're not from Harvard. Uh, and it's like, no, I'm not.

Yeah, he's working, he's not protesting.

Yeah. And, uh, yeah. And But what we— what now is we've got George Washington School of Health Sciences and Medicine. Their Department of Medical Informatics is actually wanting to deep dive into our algorithms because when we showed them what we were doing, they're like, nobody's approached it this way before. You're really getting a comprehensive picture of what happens when we give people nutrients, they're on drugs, they eat a certain way, they track their sleep, you track their exercise. and you get a total picture of what did it take to move them from that state of metabolic inflammation, which we score. We actually score— you have a score, and now it's reduced. What was that plan? Because nobody just gives vitamin D, and everybody goes, well, where's the evidence? Well, that's what we're trying to find, because I can name any 5 drugs and there's no evidence to use them all together.

Oh, exactly. Exactly. Well, I might be getting the vaccines, but 120 vaccines, show me the study.

But, uh, yeah.

And so when we had the fire fatigue centers, you know, with huge blood panels, it would take 2 years to get that doctor up to speed to understand all these. Like, instead of like, this test means this, this— that— well, okay, that's that, but that's not up, so don't worry so much about—

yeah.

So you've done that.

Yeah, damn you. No, no, but no, it's needed because we couldn't do it, you know. It, it's just so labor-intensive.

Took 4 years.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I— it's, it's pretty amazing because, I don't know, uh, I said on my slide deck, the algorithm, which is like now 1/5 of it, it takes up the whole wall. Um, of, you know, trying to show them the thought process, right? But your algorithm would be so huge.

It's only 40,000 decisions. It's only what, 40,000 decisions?

Yeah. So I mean, it's like, what computer can do that, you know? Um, no, so Hats off to you. I think that's amazing. Yes, I'm going to come out, I'm going to check that thing out because I've, I've, I've been through it trying to do it without that tool, you know.

Right, exactly. Well, I can't wait till you come down and see it. And I, you know, always it's fun to just hang out with you, man. We get a good laugh and, uh, we get to tell war stories about, uh, all, all of our different cases that we've been through. So Looking forward to it.

It is. And by the way, I had to, uh, do the intro like 3 times, so they kept making me laugh.

See how serious I got? You see that? I got serious for you, man.

So hey, thank you. You're the man. Um, appreciate it. I'm just always love the information, and I am going to burden you with, uh, coming down and uh, checking everything out. So I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. It was a blast. I hope people get some value out of our discussion.

Oh, I, I really think it's—

they will. All right.

All righty.

See you, Jim.

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