Did

you give us an example of that? Sorry, because I know you can't. Will you give us an example of like saying multiple things in the reference range that look great, but actually give you a clue?

For sure, man. So I could, this is actually what pisses me off a lot of times, actually, this is something I could talk about for hours. I think probably, like really relevant for the audience, I would say albumin, glucose and vitamin D are probably three really good examples. Beginning with albumin, albumin, a lot of people don't even know what it is, but it's in every single standard blood test and elevated, even trending high elevations are directly correlated to dehydration. So if somebody could have a normal albumin, but if it's trending high, it's absolutely representative of a dehydrated state within physiology. But albumins, and this is where reference ranges, you have to actually have a grip on the literature rather than trust the reference range. Because reference ranges, a lot of them are built on just tons of normative data of people visiting their doctor. But these people are visiting the doctor. So they're not exactly always the healthiest people. And they're also on medication, which can impact reference ranges in and of itself. So when we're building reference ranges based off of these mass amounts of people who aren't necessarily healthy and could also potentially be on medication, you need to then have a strong grip on the literature to be able to trust the reference range, especially within the context of who you're looking at. A good example, let's just keep with albumin. If you're comparing the Mayo Clinic to LabCorp, the Mayo Clinic's reference range for albumin is 3.5 to 5, whereas LabCorp's reference range for albumin is 4 to 5. Yet there was a study, it was from the Journal of Insurance Medicine, and they followed 1.7 million people for 12 years. Excellent data identified that mortality rates went up 189% once you are below four within albumin. So if you went and utilized the Mayo Clinic reference range and you're at 3.5, good to go, man, go home. You're going to be 189% more likely to die, but just go home. That's absolutely unacceptable in my opinion. Trending high can represent dehydration, but having a grip on the literature lets you know if you're going to die or not because you could be considered normal. Fairly important. Yeah, exactly. A couple other examples, vitamin D. Vitamin D is a good one because whenever something like vitamin D is something the entire industry actually needs to shape up a little bit about, even in a common sense perspective. If vitamin D comes back low on a lab, people just supplement with vitamin D. I could teach my golden retriever to do that. If something come back low, I supplement with it. Biology is never that easy. I'm sorry. It's just absolutely not that easy. When you look at vitamin D, magnesium is required for vitamin D synthesis. Magnesium is also required to convert. This is another thing people don't know. 25-hydroxyvitamin D is what people are testing, yet it's 125 that is the actual active form of vitamin D. So when you're testing 25-hydroxy, you don't know if you're testing vitamin D3 or vitamin D2. You don't even know. And then you're also not even testing the active form of vitamin D, which is 125. Magnesium is required to synthesize vitamin D and convert vitamin D. Magnesium is also involved in vitamin D binding globulin, which a lot of people don't even know exists.

Yeah. Do

you have messed up vitamin D or do you have no magnesium? It's also... Go ahead. Vitamin

D and magnesium are like the perfect segue to kind of a question that I know what the high level answer is going to be. But I'd love for you to kind of dig into the idea of like people taking their lab results saying, oh, I'm low in vitamin D. They go and take vitamin D supplements and then they go and take the magnesium off the shelf. like it's going to lead them also to these everyday vitamins and mineral pills that I know they're just putting it in there, hoping for the best, hoping that the chemistry works and then I'll be healthy tomorrow. And it's, it's, it's not the long-term solution. It's not specifically to their needs, but what are some of the pitfalls of taking a, everyday multivitamin and why that shouldn't be the answer and how someone can look at their blood work and actually make a better decision? Yeah.

So like even you just saying the low vitamin D and taking vitamin D, there's an actual, and there's excellent papers on this and not like crazy people papers. N. Haynes has published that lead has an inverse relationship with vitamin D. A lot of people don't know vitamin D actually increases your absorption of minerals. So it's been hypothesized that the body will actually, as a protective mechanism, lower vitamin D in the body in the presence of heavy metal toxicity. So if someone has low vitamin D and then they say, oh, I'm going to have more vitamin D, you could actually have a lot of lead in your body and now you're just increasing absorption of heavy metals for further toxicity. Do you have low vitamin D or is your body literally trying to protect itself from further toxicity and you're dumping in? Someone will say, well, vitamin D didn't move up with 5,000 IU, so let's bump it up to 10,000 IU. Does that sound logical? Why would we ever do that? Why is that accepted? It's so far beyond the RDA. And you don't ask why is vitamin D low? Like even this, it's so like Andy in California, where there's so much sunlight, how many people with low vitamin D have seen? Everyone. Yeah, exactly. So we need to start asking better questions instead of giving people enormous doses of vitamin D because it's correlated with so many other factors. Can you

dig into that? Because that actually is like wildly, wildly living

in PB. This is also a massive fucking problem is you you can actually look back, uh, some of the guys that brought through a lot of the vitamin D stuff years ago. So now we're talking, uh, five plus years of research now. And this has been fairly clear in the literature, um, that the measurement methods of vitamin D probably are very questionable. Right. And now actually, and Dan just posted this a couple of days ago on his Instagram. I saw if you look at what's actually coming in vitamin D supplements. So if you think you're taking 5,000 IUs, it could be 10 to a hundred fold off, up or down. So you could be taking 500,000 IUs per pill. You could be taking five. And then it's a very common, if you look across the vitamin D supplements, you're just getting a fucking insanely wide range of actual dosage. And that doesn't even take into context what Dan was just talking about of why is your vitamin D low? Is it that you're not in the sun? Well, okay, maybe. But there's all kinds of problems here. And this is exactly why I was saying earlier, just don't do blood work and start taking pills. You really, really have to look at the system because you're going to get false findings. And this is literally what I was talking about earlier, or you're going to go in a worse direction. And Dan's made one example here and I could give you, and he could give you a hundred more examples of if you just take micronutrients in supplemental form, you're introducing the possibility of a whole bunch of problems. Some of them are pretty fail safe and not that big a deal, but others aren't. And if you don't really know what you're doing, when it comes to micronutrients from food, you're probably just fine. You're not going to be into toxicity levels by eating too many oranges or things like that. Well, now when you're taking pharmacologicals, which we call supplements that, right, you're getting them now at dosages that are orders of magnitude higher than you would ever get them in Whole Foods. And so you're introducing whole cascades of potential issues. Many of them are probably fairly benign, but some aren't. And even benign problems are not going to cut it for people trying to break world records, or at least their own internal physiology, right? They're trying to maximize their personal physiology. Well, then you need a little bit more precision. And with all the stuff we're talking about, there still is a little bit of unknown, right? The gut microbiome is far from perfect. There's a tremendous amount of garbage in that space. And even something like vitamin D, we just assume you can measure D. And Dan just talked about how that's not necessarily the best assumption. I'll look at reference ranges for albumin, which Dan talked, it is literally on every blood work panel anyone has ever done. Same thing with triglycerides, all these other stuff. They're not perfect. So you really, really, really have to look at things in context with the rest of the things, right? So if we did a blood work and we saw someone's vitamin D was low, and then we looked at their hair analysis and saw, oh, bam, we're picking up heavy metals in the hair. Now we start making the appropriate action. If we just stopped at the blood work, maybe you needed some vitamin D. Maybe we could just say, hey, get out in the sun more. Don't take the vitamin D. Or maybe vitamin D was the worst possible scenario. So just walking around being like, okay, magnesium is good. Vitamin D is good. Okay. Creatine is good. Vitamin C is good. All right. B6 is Dan talked about B6 and B12. Okay, cool. I'm just going to take this B complex. I'm just going to throw it all in the system.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually am super curious. Yeah. I think I'm super curious too. Cause you is one of my favorite things, I guess you could say when it comes to this. Trouble sleeping, take magnesium, crazy-ass dreams. You're basically just getting high for a couple nights and you notice changes. But long-term, what's actually going on? Yeah, night one through three, I had these super vivid dreams. Deep sleep shows up on my watch. I must be doing everything right, but how do I know I'm actually getting the right dose of anything besides just like feeling some effects because I got this new drug inside me? You

want to make it even worse? Just take melatonin too. Don't even get it started on.

Melatoninatonin is hold on tell me if i'm relatively right on this because i notice a lot of things by having a a three-year when like we give it melatonin she sleeps for three hours next thing you know she's wide awake and we've got the worst night in the world ahead of us because it it doesn't stay in the system long and now i feel like a terrible parent that i just drugged my kid and andy's shaking his head like i should be

a child you've got to be real careful of no one time and dan can't explain why if he wants to write hand but that's that's a i'm

never doing that again just because of andy's head shake right there that was the disapproval of andy galfan yeah yeah that parent that was the disappointed dad

crash in somebody's testosterone load him up on melatonin see what happens yeah

we could get yeah yeah but yeah to just kind of recap the question like how does somebody know once they start taking it and then they start feeling the effects that it's actually the right thing for them versus just having it in their system and it being this short-term effect versus a long-term solution to where they're –

Okay, don't forget your question, Dan. You can tell them right now. One of our more recent melatonin stories. I was already thinking that.

You guys are going to like

this one. Sorry to do your question twice, Andrew, but this is

gold. So we had a guy recently who is a hundred times over the upper end range limit for melatonin. A hundred times. And let's remember melatonin is a hormone. It's not just a supplement. Melatonin is a hormone. It is a hormone structure within the body. And we just recently had a guy whose intake or his measures came back 100 times over the upper reference range limit. So like that toxicity data I posted on vitamin D, where some people were literally taking 1.6 million IU of vitamin. Yeah. In the millions. And they thought they were taking 1000. Why can't that happen with melatonin? It absolutely can happen with melatonin. But then to answer, answer your question. You know what it feels like, Andrews, when you

walk around with eight grams of melatonin in your blood all day, he's looking around sedated all day, just sedated. And then you wonder why you feel, oh, I'm so sleepy. I need more melatonin. I'm so sleepy. I don't get good sleep. I'm not getting quality sleep. My hours are fine. I'm not getting quality. No, you're fucking sedated all day. And then you think your caffeine tolerance is high. Yeah, it's like

taking all the Sudafed. You're like, wow, I feel like I'm on meth right now. It's the opposite.

I took nutrition class you know while I'm doing this thing and like there's some pretty big dangers of taking like the too much of these micronutrients there was like one where a gymnast coach like was telling her you know telling her athlete to take I forget it was like it was one of the bees and like the girl became almost paralyzed from taking too much like i have to go reference it and then and i'll send it to you guys but like what are some of the dangers of just taking you know too much of these micronutrients well

i mean it all travels back to kind of how i opened the podcast right the the questions why are you taking it it's it's. So like when Anders is saying, how do I know if I'm taking enough vitamin or how am I know if I'm taking enough magnesium? The question still is, why are you taking magnesium? Because are you actually repleting a magnesium need or is there a depletion happening from elsewhere within the physiology? So I think taking any micronutrient from a supplement company that's not third-party tested, there's already a danger in that all by itself because you're placing trust in a company that's done nothing to earn it, nothing at all. And this stuff can absolutely create a toxic effect in your body. But then in a lot of cases, people are well-intentioned, but they just don't know they're operating on a symptom-based level, which is something I just, I can't ever recommend. So the question of why always needs to be at the forefront. And I think whenever you're talking about bigger doses of anything, or especially utilizing a hormone, or even asking, sleep is supposed to be a normal physiological function. It is not supposed to be a chore to fall asleep. So something's wrong with the physiology. You're not in a deficit of a supplement. It's something where you should ideally be looking at what's going on internally, because you're exhausted. You should be able to sleep at the end of the day. Sleep.

We've, we've gone, uh, an hour and 20 minutes, uh, giving the cliffhanger on testosterone. Um, can we, can we start that one? Cause I know sleep is just a massive piece of that obesity, strength training, muscle mass, all of those things. Um, and Galpin just alluded to it on, um, the, the melatonin side of things and, and overall production. Um, if we were to just start at the top and, and work our way into, um, the testosterone conversation, um, can, can you kind of kick that off of just what you're looking at when you look at labs and normal ranges, you're, for many reasons, it's now all the way down to 200 can be considered normal up to 900. Um, yeah.

How

do you start to just assess, uh, testosterone levels and, and begin that conversation with athletes?

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, that's a point, even right away. Like when you look at a reference range, that's enormous. It's a good indication that you should look at the literature to try and narrow that reference range down yourself to see what information is actually available on this kind of stuff. Because I can tell you, a male with 200 testosterone is going to feel a little different than a male with 900 testosterone. Yeah, both are considered completely normal. And yet let's also look at it. Let's say we're across a 10 year span and you went from 900, 800, 700, 600, 500, 400. Why is that happening? Yeah. You're still considered normal. No one's going to ask the question why you've decreased your testosterone by 50% over the last five years? It's because I'm getting older. No, it's not. There is absolutely another answer in there. I actually worked with an NFL Hall of Famer, and he was 71 years old. His testosterone came back at 1,100, and he's natural. 1,100. Get it, bro. Yeah, 1,100. He was 71, and it's 100 natural so it's absolutely it's not this age thing you can there's always some sort of a root cause going on in there so when you're looking at labs you're looking at testosterone um synthesis um you have to look at a lot of things like if you're if you're going to go back to the steroid metabolization chart all the way back in in your endocrinology class you're going to be looking at saturated fat and ldls being combined with vitamin b5 we're going to combine these things to make a cool thing called acetyl coa and ultimately allows us make pregnenolone pregnenolone can be converted into dhea but ultimately to testosterone, to rate limiting minerals or zinc and magnesium. So even if even a lot of people will supplement with DHEA, but if we don't have zinc and magnesium, we're not going to get that optimal conversion over to testosterone. So we need those saturated fats. We need some LDLs. We need B5. We need our zinc and our magnesium for all of those metabolic pathways to be properly taking place. But then we also should ask, why is testosterone even low? Well, cadmium and arsenic have both been demonstrated to depress testosterone. So do you have low testosterone or do you just have an abundance of metals building up within the body? Cadmium and arsenic have been directly shown to impact testosterone production within the body. So we have beneficial micronutrients contributing to testosterone synthesis. We have heavy metal toxicity that can suppress testosterone synthesis. And then you also have to look at other things too, simply like energy state of the body. Hypocalorism, we can expect some reductions in testosterone. I remember seeing data that even five days of sleep deprivation reduces testosterone by 15%. So we would have to take sleep into the consideration as well. And then previously, I talked at looking at root causes. And this is why when I freaking find a root cause, I'm like, yes, because it's our blueprint to the championship. Because when we are impacting stressors, our environmental, psychological, emotional, physical, or the hidden stressor that I'm identifying in the lab, stressors create cortisol. Cortisol runs antagonistic with testosterone. So when we eliminate stressors from our physiology, we are reducing glucocorticoids that run antagonistic testosterone, allowing testosterone to better optimize itself. So there's a lot of different pathways we can go, whether it's toxicity, micronutrient availability, or any of the five stressors in order to impact testosterone. And when you get all of those unifying, like Andy talked about before, before we, I think it was before we recorded i've tripled people's testosterone in a matter of months it's it's something that's absolutely possible and it's things things can turn around fast like usually people who um who don't have a fast turnaround are people who aren't confident like that they've had a like uh we can't even get into it right now but the idea of adrenal fatigue is beyond silly nonsense. I've destroyed that elsewhere and I'll happily destroy it again. But that would take about an hour or so. But you can have very fast turnarounds. Like where I was going with this is people have had sepsis. Sepsis, there can be extreme cortisol issues with sepsis. But people who survive it, sepsis, by the way is deathbed stuff so people who are unfamiliar if you survive it and you get out of the hospital there's direct data on this that cortisol secretion goes from absolutely zero back to totally normal in two weeks so some people will say like oh your adrenals is going to take six to 12 months of healing and you'll have to take these herbs and you're going to have to do Tai Chi. And then we'll do yoga at the same time and we'll call it T yoga. And it's just, there's a lot of silly things that end up happening, but those, your body is the, is a regeneration machine, basically except the kidneys. But a lot of things regenerate incredibly quickly. But just a good example, adrenals from a deathbed illness can be completely regenerated in a couple of weeks. So when people say testosterone takes like many, many, many years and years and years in order to bounce back, it absolutely doesn't. If you know what you're doing, if you found the root cause, because the root cause, a lot of times the root cause writes my program for me because when i find that root cause now i've got a blueprint to work forward from yeah what do you find the most common to

tie that all together for you like a really super tangible example of this um if you found any number of dan you could give an example if you want but any number of things going on in the gut. And again, we need to acknowledge that you can't take any just $100 poop sample thing and figure out what's going on. There's a lot of nonsense in the field of gut diagnostics, and there's a tremendous amount to learn, a tremendous amount. So we're going to come back and refine this stuff as we go. Having said that, there's enough literature in this area where you can see some major red flags that stand out. Some of them in particular can help you identify things like this. Dan just went through this whole cascade of what it means to have testosterone and why it's not optimized. Well, if you have, say, a vitamin B deficiency, say B6, and we've actually seen this one specifically a number of times, you don't know if it's a combination or if it's caused by lack of consumption of B vitamins. So the wrong food choices, even if you're eating your macros and calories and you're eating whole real foods, etc. If you're not getting enough of the B vitamins in your diet, or if it's an issue of not absorbing them. And the reason the gut is important is because certain things that we can find in the gut at like crazy cuckoo levels can directly be involved in, in reduction of B vitamin absorption. And so this is why these lab diagnostics are so important because we can say, Hey, your gut looks okay, let's look at your food okay you're not eating foods that are high in B vitamins this is what's causing those problems and then follow Dan's last explanation for why that all of a sudden led to your testosterone below and this is why he's saying like we can see these pretty miraculous improvements in a couple of months in testosterone because if we go in and find hey this is all because you had this one little yeast overgrowth or this small opportunistic bacterial overgrowth once we calm that down all of a sudden you can triple quadruple like huge x your b absorbed and going on your stomach and then as a result testosterone cortisol fixes itself out so we never use trt we don't use not enough or against it but for what we do most of our athletes can't take us not legal well none of them really can well some but but that's how you can get these huge increases in whatever pick pick your dependent variable by simply finding root cause and the root cause is often the gut and they'll not always but that's why we mean like all this stuff matters you simply can't just do a blood draw and say, Oh, your testosterone is low. Get on TRT. Maybe, but there's a better answer here for most. I

feel like anytime you start to just take something exogenous like that and not looking at sleep and the big rocks first, you really are just, I don't know what the long-term effects are of that but it's going to be a never-ending process where you just have to keep upping dosage and never actually looking at in the mirror and going well you need to sleep better we need to eat better we need to eliminate body fat better how does body fat actually play into because the people that are listening to this show the people that we're working with like we're not taking them from normal levels to superhuman feats of strength going to get into an octagon. It's somebody that needs to lose 40 pounds and like can't get out of bed in the morning without feeling like crap. Like that's, that's the, the levels that I feel like a very natural path of eating better, body fat, sleep, and moving the big rocks just to get to a body fat that allows it. But everything that we read right now, it really points to obesity and having that extra 40 pounds of body fat in your belly specifically, being just one of the leading indicators of things are just out of whack.

Sure. I mean, in respect to testosterone for being overweight, there's so many other pathways you can go there as well.