Learn True Health with Ashley James 376 Learn Functional Lab Testing and Holistic Lifestyle Medicine, Restoring Order To Metabolic Chaos, Holistic Health Practitioner and Certified Nutritional Therapist, Founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, Reed Davis
https://learntruehealth.com/FDN
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Functional Lab Testing And Holistic Lifestyle Medicine https://www.learntruehealth.com/functional-lab-testing-and-holistic-lifestyle-medicine
Highlights:
- What is functional diagnostic nutrition?
- Getting information, identifying the key phrase and healing opportunities
- Focus on is underlying causes and conditions
- Catabolic and anabolic stress and how you can do lab testing to find out if you have it
- HIDDEN stressors and dysfunctions in the body
- Running lab tests to discover healing opportunities
- Investigating and looking at these critical markers for balance in your body
- looking for the hidden contributors to metabolic chaos and to the degree that the root causes are discoverable to work on it
They say “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” but we all know that it’s not just an apple that we have to get in order to have a healthy body. Diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplements can play a big role too. Listen to today’s podcast and listen to what Reed Davis has to say about things that you should know about to help you to optimize your health and your way to functional nutrition.
[0:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. I’m very excited for you to hear our interview today with Reed Davis, the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. A few months ago, I interviewed one of his graduates who practice as a health coach with this unique ability to do functional lab testing and then help their clients to find those healing opportunities that the labs present. It’s a different philosophy. A different lens that these health coaches look through to see how they can best serve their clients to finally resolve the metabolic chaos that’s been going on. We often treat symptoms and our medical system even someone has a thyroid condition for example and they think that that’s the root cause and so they’re treating the thyroid but thyroid dysfunction covers from something else. What causes the thyroid to have a dysfunction? And there are dozens of root causes. Functional Diagnostic Nutrition looks to solve that. Today we’re going to dive into what is Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and how can it help you to achieve the best health possible. Those who are already health coaches or in the holistic health field you’re going to love learning about Reed’s program. He has a wonderful online certification program where he teaches you how to do these labs. How to interpret them and how to then help the clients to get the results we’re looking for through lifestyle, diet and when needed, supplementation. If you’re not in the holistic health space and you’re not interested in making a career in helping people like becoming a health coach, you will still enjoy today’s interview because he does teach a lot of wonderful things. He’s told me that some people even take his course just to learn these tools for themselves which I thought was very valuable. After interviewing him, I enrolled in his program and I jumped in and I’m already in module two and I’m loving it. I’m absolutely loving it. I’m learning so much. What I really like about his program is it’s all “rubber hits the road.” There’s no fluff. You jump straight in and you begin learning. I’ve been studying with Naturopaths and doctors and reading tons of books and going to health lectures and obviously doing 300 interviews with doctors and in my first few days of being in his course I have learned stuff I have never heard off before. It’s really exciting. If you’re a health coach I hugely recommend checking out his course because as you know I’m a health coach, I’ve been doing this for several years. I’ve always felt that there’s a piece missing. This piece of looking at things objectively through the lens of proper labs. Reed talks about this today in the show. You’re going to really like the kinds of labs that he does. It’s not the kind of labs that you’re ever used to going to your doctor. These are totally different and it allows us to see where the metabolic chaos is. In some cases, actually, let us find the root cause but regardless of whether we find the root cause or not, they will allow us to see what we need to see in order to make the appropriate changes to support the body in coming back into balance. That’s very exciting. Enjoy today’s interview and please, check out the link. Learntruehealth.com/FDN. As in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. That’s Learntruehealth.com/FDN. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview.
[04:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 376. I’m very excited for today’s guest, we have with us, Reed Davis. He’s the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. An amazing company that helps people to become certified in functional nutrition. I definitely want to dive into that because we have a lot of health coaches that listen and this is a wonderful adjunct to those who are in the holistic health space or for people who want to get into the holistic health space, it’s a wonderful course that they can take. For those who aren’t, who just want to get their own health back and that’s why they’re listening. This episode is also perfect for you because we’re going to be talking about lab testing and the things that you should know about to help you to optimize your health. The things that going to a mainstream medical doctor, practitioner they just wouldn’t know to provide you and so Reed’s going to enlighten us today. Reed, welcome to the show.
[05:09] Reed Davis: Welcome. Thanks so much for having me here Ashley. It’s a real pleasure. Looking forward to trying to help some people.
[05:16] Ashley James: Before we get started, you were telling me a bit about where you live which is a paradise up in the mountains. You’re living off a grid and you’re using a satellite phone. So far the connection’s been wonderful and every time we hear a little bit of a delay on the line we’ll just remember that you’re living in absolute paradise on a lake in the mountains. Totally off the grid and we so appreciate that you’re taking the time to educate us today.
[05:45] Reed Davis: Thanks again. I’m happy to answer anything I can. Tell you the history. It’s about helping people and trying to walk the talk. I’m here for you and your pleasure.
[05:57] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’d love to start by hearing your story. You are a certified nutritional therapist. You’re a holistic health practitioner. You founded this wonderful company that helps people to learn how they can do these lab tests for themselves and for their clients. Then what to do once they have the lab results, which I think the most important thing about. Right? It’s good to have the lab testing but then what do we do? Okay, so now I see that my liver enzymes are high but what do we do? You have wonderful course that helps people to learn functional nutrition. How did you start? What happened in your life that lead you to want to do this?
[06:41] Reed Davis: Yes. Thanks so much. It’s an amazing course in lab work and natural protocols to fix what you find. But it was a long time coming. Back in the 90s, I was doing environmental law. I came out of a law program at the University of San Diego. Went right to work saving the planet, birds, bees, air, water, trees. What can we do to clean up the planet and it’s very rewarding work. Frankly, I made millions of dollars for the owners but not for myself. As I increase therapist, my income didn’t grow up that much and southern California’s a very expensive place to live. So I was looking around for a way where I could be my own boss, work for myself but also continue the work. I turned my attention from saving the planet to people like what’s this environment if it’s killing off the bird and bees and air and water and trees and things. What’s it doing to people including myself? What’s it doing to me? I’m getting older too right? Back then I was probably in my 40s but I was again working hard and I went to work, changed jobs. I went to work at a clinic. It’s a wellness clinic or a wellness center in Southern California in San Diego area. It’s beautiful. People were lovely. I was really hired to run the business and help expand the business. But the owner who was a chiropractor. She allowed me to go with her kind of as an assistant. She was getting a diploma in nutrition for her chiropractic work. And said, “Hey, you can come along and you can get certified too.” Not a physician but I did that. This was remarkable, Ashley. You’ll love this. She let me work in her patients in between classes. I’d go into a lesson. Let’s say in detoxification come back and I had access to her patients to talk to them about their health and find out what’s going on and see if I can help them with this training that I was getting. I’ve had many other trainings since was you mentioned. Kind of been a certificate collector of sorts. I think everyone listening probably will see this in a way a learn freak. Just never satisfied with what you know. I know there’s a deeper layer. There’s something else I can learn. I was like that too but also, in the clinic, this is remarkable. Again, I had the ability to help clients and I fell in love with that side of it. I turn my attention instead of just running the clinic and helping to grow and things like that but I still had to do that but I fell in love with the clinical side that means working face to face with people. One of the things I noticed right away was that almost everybody walking to the door for their pain or whatever it was, they had multiple complaints and they’ve been to multiple practitioners trying to get some resolution or solutions to their problem. Some of them 10 doctors already. That just blew my mind. Even though I was neophyte that was 20 years ago, I said to myself and to them even ”Look, I’m going to be the last person you need to see. We’re going to figure this out.” I’ve been very good that the legal research and writing and I could understand fairly complex things and try to make it easy for people. That was another part of my job at that time we’ll just call it patient educator. I got to look at very complex things break it down and try to explain it people so that they could go out and do the things that took to get well.
I could just again, very fortunate with the stars lined up or whatever you want to put it. I met doctors who are running alternative lab work. Back then, 20 years ago, there was just standard medicine and alternative also known as quackery. Some of these doctors, I’ve learned from were not very low respected at that time. They were pioneering doing really important work especially with some of the labs that were coming out. The saliva testing, the urine testing, the stool testing. Things I would say above and beyond normal blood chemistry. Some of these people come in and they’re really sick. They just feel lousy all that time. Things about the way they look and the way they feel that they’re not happy with. Their physicians were saying, “Your bloodwork looks normal. Everything looks fine. You’re just getting old.” Or you’ve heard that before, right?
[11:28] Ashley James: Right. We’ll definitely get into this. Like what is normal? because they’re waiting until you’re in a disease state so they can give you a drug. If you’re unhealthy but you’re not yet sick enough not to be put on a drug to manage the disease, then they’re going to tell you that you’re fine. That’s if you go to a mainstream medical doctor.
[11:54] Reed Davis: Right. You’re considered by them to be sub-clinical. You haven’t reached that point where your bloodwork looks so out of whack that they can diagnose you. This is another the beauty of our work. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, Ashley. There is no medical diagnosis or treatment for that specific thing. Just for feeling lousy and you’re overweight and you’re tired or maybe there’s stuff going on with your sinuses, allergies, moodiness, irritability, digestive problem and all these things but you’re not at that point where you need to be referred to a gastroenterologist there’s something in a way standard measure. Back to the story, I’m seeing people in the office now, I started going into the public and recruiting. I bought a bone density testing machine. I started doing that two days a week. Clinic was open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and I work very hard. I do 12-14 hours a day easily or to a lot of weekends. A couple of days a week. I would go out and for 5 years, I’m going to go twice a week to these grocery stores. Some small chain about 30 stores. I would just go from one to the next, test people for their bone density and this is mostly women between I’d say 40 and 60 because that’s who gets checked and they’re getting early checks. I’d get certified in that part to use that machine kind of radiology limited tech certificate and I was doing this testing and then I was helping those women with that problem like they had low bone density and I got into the hormones and the immune systems and digest and detoxification. I learned how to run the labs. Again, I was very fortunate to be working with some physicians who let me run labs under their license as their protégé is you will. Actually as their alter ego because their licensure restricted them from what they could do let’s say for a person. This is still happening today that it- yes, you’re laughing but even just last week I was [Inaudible 13:58] I was at Medfit tour at the Washington athletic club in Seattle. I was speaking to a group up there about a hundred personal trainers and some physicians and one physician said, “I feel like my medical license are handcuffs. I’m just about ready to give up my license because I want to do what’s really right for people.” 20 years ago, it was worse. Doctors were just tied up to these model of diagnose-treat-diagnose-treat. Very small specific thing. It’s almost always it’s writing a prescription. I was actually like an alter ego.
I got to say to these people anything. Forget the diagnosis, what’s really wrong. Again the saliva testing, urine testing, stool testing, looking at hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and autonomic balance. The sympathetic para-sympathetic. I ran thousands of those labs on thousands of people. Mostly women because that seem most interested but then when we got some good results and actually some miracle cases early on. Just unbelievable things happened that told me I was on the right track. Then they would refer, they bring in their husbands, they bring in their kids. If you want I could tell you a quick story about an early case that gave me tremendous faith and hope and belief in what I was doing. A lady comes into the chiropractic office and you know, I would walk the patients back to the treatment room. I was also trained, took a course in Myo-fascia release. I could do a specialized trigger point therapy on their necks and upper shoulders and things before they got their chiropractic adjustment. One day I was taken aback and I could just tell she as not feeling right, she was depressed and I asked what’s wrong. She said, “Reed, it’s this weight. This 40 pounds and I’m really depressed about it.” “What are you doing?” “Well, I can’t do anything because I’m on this medication for the hives. It was a steroid that makes me fat. So I talked to my doctor yesterday” and she said, “he said, Lady, you have your choice. you’re going to be overweight or you’re going to have the hives. Take your pick.” So yes, you can imagine. She’s just distraught. She said, “And I told him that was really depressing and he offered me to write a prescription for anti-depressants.”
[16:27] Ashley James: Oh, of course!
[16:29] Reed Davis: Yes. So check this out. Again, this is a long time ago. I didn’t know really exactly I was doing. I was learning but I didn’t know I was doing but I was doing awfully a lot too. I said, “Susan, did anyone ever try to find out why you get the hives?” Her neck just about snapped, her head just about snapped out of her neck. You know she was, “Well, what do you mean”?” I said, “There’s a test you can find out. Are you sensitive to something? Is there something in your environment? There’s all kind of ways to investigate that. That’s what I do. I’m like a health detective.” She goes, ”No. No one’s ever mentioned that.” Anyway, to get to the chase, we get her take home some test kits. Found out that some things she was very sensitive to, got her off of those things. Mostly dietary and within two weeks, she was off her medication and she told her doctor, “I’m never going back on it again”. I found what the problem is and I’m avoiding it. Then 2 weeks after that she was off her medication. She was doing two things that she hadn’t done in a couple of years. One was take a hot shower because even on the meds she got the hives. The other is working out to the point of perspiration because even on the meds she got the hives. It completely changed her life. She became a happy person. She started losing weight. She started feeling like her old self. Now I have to add that there’s some other labs and the hormones and immune and digestion. There a lot of things you could tune up on a person. That just told me then that I was on the right track. So many stories like that where early on I did not know at all but I was figuring out a system of investigation. Where to look for these underlying causes and conditions instead of, “Here’s something for the hives and the depressants because you’ve gained 40 pounds. Here’s something for the depression.” It’s such a contrast as you will know.
[18:36] Ashley James: I love it. That was your early on experience which got you so excited about helping people that you were shocked to find out that when people go to their mainstream doctor, they wait until they’re sick, put them on a drug and then when they have a side effect. They put them on another drug for the side effect and so on and so forth. Instead of trying to figure out how to solve it. If we look back at the history of allopathic medicine, about a 150 years ago and start to look back to the beginning of what is now MD medicine. Right? If we look at the history we see that. This is not conspiracy theory. This is fact. We see that a large, a person, it was Carnegie who owned a pharmaceutical company is that one that invested in making sure that the education, he invested in all the universities that taught medical doctors to only teach basically how to prescribe drugs. To this day, the education of doctors is largely manipulated by the pharmaceutical companies. They don’t want doctors to learn how to get to the root cause of chronic illness. I love allopathic medicine for emergencies, for some surgeries, when it’s necessary especially emergency medicine. For some infections, that’s where they shine but take a chronic illness to an MD their wheelhouse, their toolset is drugs that manage symptoms not most of them not getting to the root cause especially when it comes to more sensitive tests like you said. Things like food sensitivities or understanding genetics, understanding diet and nutrition. They don’t have an education around that. Unfortunately, they have a hubris, not all of them but some of them have a hubris to assume that they know everything about health because they paid so much for their education, right? I have had a few MDs on the show who said to me, “I really thought I know everything.” And they really do. They think they know everything so when you come to them with hives, they don’t question what’s causing the hives. They just assume, “Okay, you have hives. You’re just going to have for the rest of your life, here’s a drug,” Same with my type II diabetes. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility all the problems I had all that. All the MDs told me was that we can manage it with drugs and I would be that way for the rest of my life and I will never have kids. I told you before we hit record because you asked me about my personal story but it was because I veered off and started to look for holistic solutions that I was able to resolve all of them. All of the things that the MDs said were my life sentences basically. I love that early on, you saw that there’s a huge need for functional diagnostic nutrition. What happened next? You were having these aha moments. Moments when you’re working with the clients in the clinic. What lead you to want to start functional diagnostic nutrition?
[21:11] Reed Davis: Yes, sure. You know I want to just follow up a bit on what you said first. The fact that allopathic physicians, they’re the best at what they do. They want to help it. They save lives every single day. If you get off of a plane from West Africa and your temperature is 106 and you’re bleeding out of your eyeballs or something. You don’t call your nutritionist, you go for the best standard care you possibly can find. The hospitals and doctors are full of people who could really help you at that point. Same thing if you have a car accident and your bone is sticking out of your arm bleeding. You don’t call your health coach and have it fixed, it’s so fantastic at that right? Really keep those things in mind. The next thing for me was just the sheer grind. I was just grinding for years? I didn’t stop to think about what kind of a big movement I could start or something like that. I was really enjoying myself. Earning a very good living. Building one of the busiest, we’ll call it a nutrition practice in the country, in the US. Again at San Diego. I was just doing my thing. Working in the office, really helping all the patients that were coming in. Learning how to teach them, how to educate them in plain English on the things that they could do. Which really in the big concept in the chiropractic office and wellness center. We had other doctors. Acupuncturist, we even had an osteopath but it’s not what you do in the office, its what you do at home in between office visits. That’s when I because an expert at. At least a guy with a plan, a guy with a system because it was all based on observation. If you run thousands of labs on thousands of people, you’re going to learn a few things. What I learned is where the alternative practitioners of the day we’re leaving planks.
There are this gaps in person with a health problem. There are gaps. It’s called the cycle of trial and error actually. You go to a physician he says, “All your bloodwork looks normal” or even if he says, “It looks abnormal” the answer’s just a prescription to treat the paper in most. Thyroids a perfect example. “You have a cluster of symptom sounds like thyroid.” so they run a thyroid test. Yep, pat myself in the back. “You have hyperthyroid. Here’s your medication.” It traces the paper definitely, they can adjust the doses to get the numbers on the paper that look like what they want. That doesn’t make the person any better. It’s treating the test results and the symptoms, not the person. The best blessing I had was not being able to write a prescription. Not being a doctor. You know at first I thought, I should be a doctor so I can help these people. No. Grinding it out for years and years in the office, running to labs to figure out what’s really wrong and then how to fix it. What does that person need to go home and do in between doctors’ visits? I came up with that DRESS for health success system. The D-R-E-S-S. We can get it into that what that is, that’s the lifestyle medicine that there’s now band-aid about by lots of pundits. People who might have come and got training in something. Even people that take my course, they’re much better educated once they’re done but grinning it out being on the discovery levels was happy days. Just working hard. You asked, how to finally turn that into FDN. I was out lecturing not only doing my screenings with the bone density machines. I invented other screening just to get people and get them doing some lab work. Get them running some saliva and urine testing which is easy to take home. It’s not expensive and everyone can do it, so anyone can run these labs. Getting information, identifying, this is the key phrase. Healing opportunities like what’s really wrong.
Again if you’re hormone balance, if you’re not breaking down assimilating food very well if your liver is congested, you won’t be detoxifying your body and on and on. If the immune system is overactive or underactive. These are not medical diagnosis they’re just identifying healing opportunities, things that a person can fix. Of course, it isn’t but one of the trainings I took taught us to substitute drugs with supplements. I tried that for a while and that didn’t work. It’s much more than just a naturopathic medicine should be much more than just “Here’s the test, here’s the wrong in the paper, here’s some supplements that can fix it.” versus “Here’s some drugs that’ll fix it.” That’s not what would work for me. Again, the whole entire lifestyle medicine thing. I started figuring out how do I know what is the right diet for everybody. Everyone has to eat. You’re made of food. I used to weigh 8 pounds when I was born now I weigh 198 pounds pretty big guy. Where that extra weight come from? It came from food. You ate food and it built the body. So that’s really important. Then also, rest or sleep but rest, knowing how to really get good deep non-realm rest is critical to having a healthy body. Then the exercise, I became a personal fitness trainer and all of that learning about the physical body. Then, of course, another letter is – so that’s Diet, Rest, Exercise, D-R-E-S-S, it spells DRESS for health success. Diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and then, of course, the supplements. I put supplements last. They’re what people want to start with but I don’t really believe that. They’re important but it’s really the D, the R and the E and the first S, stress reduction. You’ve heard that word stress before, right? You probably don’t have any but there’s so many different kinds. I learned about stress.
A matter fact I read in 2001, in an article in a naturopathic medicine that that was responsible for 50% of office visits and up to 80% of chronic degenerative disease. Some form of stress. I looked into different types of stress. Mental, emotional, physical trauma and of course, what I specialize in, is the environmental and the biological biochemical stressors, chemical stressors. It’s really a holistic lifestyle program that was developed over years of working with people, finding out what works how do you customize it. Based upon the actual healing opportunities that I discovered with the labs. If you run thousands of labs in thousands of people and you pay attention, I made observations on who got better and who didn’t. It should be no surprise to anyone listening, those people who worked closest to the underlying cause were the ones who got better but it was not so intuitive. This is where it kind of takes the twist where you really have to be observant is people with the exact same set of symptoms can have them for completely different upstream dysfunction. One person with the thyroid disorder where they’re hypothyroid, whereas their thyroids not making enough T4 or is making T4 but was not converting into T3 properly. Those are basics. Why? Instead of just giving them medication, we want to know why. What I’ve discovered in 10 people, you might find 10 different reasons why. That’s the not so intuitive part that helped me developed functional diagnostic nutrition, the entire program. Which is the investigation, which labs were on? Which observations can be capitalized on. We’re going to make some observations about healing opportunities as long as we’re given time, we can capitalize on those. Again, if you have a temperature of a 106 and you’re bleeding out of all references, don’t call me. Go get checked out first. If you have a big, blood’s on your forehead like some tumor growing. That needs a more attendant care, emergency care. You go get that handled but then what? You come back and we do a program for you. This holistic functional diagnostic nutrition and the Dress For Health success program. That took a lot of years.
[31:27] Ashley James: Very cool. As you developed this, did you see when you applied DRESS, the Dress For Health success to everyone that you got even better results?
[31:42] Reed Davis: Well, yes. Today, 11 years ago I was asked to teach the system. It wasn’t good enough for one guy in California to be using it. How many people could I actually serve? Again, I had one of the busiest practices in the country. I was told that by my vendors. The people that I did business with especially a couple of the laboratories. They said, “Who the hell are you? No one does this much lab work.” If this was on the doctor’s office and there’s five doctors working there, “Who are you again? You’re a nutritionist? You’re doing all these lab work?” Well yes, I did it actually because I didn’t know you can’t do it. [Laughter] Like, “You can’t do that. Who are you? You can’t do that.” and I just would explain how hard I’d like to work and the number of people and the system I was developing. Finally, it’s became time to start chasing it to other practitioners. I started deputizing with just about anyone at first. There’s a lot of they didn’t call them health coaches back then now there’s a lot medical health coaches, I think we’re pioneer in that area because they’re allied practitioner we’re not medical doctors for the most part. We have personal trainers and people who do raki and nutrition and dietitians and nurses and physical therapist and you just name it, chiropractors, acupuncture. Basically not MDs. What they want to focus on is underlying causes and conditions. Ashley, really quickly we’re talking about the history. It’s really important. In 1903, Thomas Edison said a very famous quote from the great inventor who was right about a lot of things but he was wrong about this and I see people using this quote all over the place it says, “The doctor of the future would give no medicine. But will interest his patients instead in care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” What is wrong? Doctors are still giving medicine. It’s 113 years later? When is the future? If it’s not now, when is it? If physicians are still giving medicine, who then is going to interest the person in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease? It’s health coaches and allied practitioners. We’re the ones. We’re the army if you will saying, give the care of disease to physicians. We freely grant them full monopoly. We don’t care about disease, you’re the experts. You studied disease. You studied symptoms that might kill someone. That’s a good thing. They can do stuff that I can’t do. I can’t order a CT scan to see if you have tumors and other great things that they can do. Although some of that is a big waste of money. I had client once who, I mentioned to her she was going to take that supplement. There’s possibility of that you might get a little bit of vasodilator headache. You might get some headaches if you take too much of this stuff. So back off you go back down to the original dosage and things like that. About 3 weeks later, I’m talking to her and she goes, “I’m going in for a brain scan from my headaches.” I go, “what?” she goes, ”I called my doctor and I told him I’ve been having headaches for three weeks, she wants to give me a brain scan.” I said, “Well okay, if three weeks, how long have you been taking that supplement that I suggested to take?” she said, “About 3 weeks.” Doctors look for brain tumors or things and we work in different ways. I think you get the point I’m trying to make. It’s good to get your brain scan I guess. I can’t order that test but it’s good to have a doctor around who’s licensed to do that but we look for things in a different way. What are the healing opportunities, it’s a different set of labs.
[36:11] Ashley James: It’s a different philosophy. You’re looking at that through a different lens right? Looking for the healing opportunities and doctors are looking for what drugs can I prescribe. That’s their toolset. It’s a different philosophy.
[36:25] Reed Davis: It’s totally different. Again, back to this idea that there’s gaps. People are caught in a cycle of trial and error. There isn’t enough health coaches and allied practitioners around. The purpose and the fact that the populations getting more unhealthy. Drug uses getting more rampant. We have people being advertised to and television. Going to the doctors and saying, “Hey, I want to try these medication for whatever.” The doctor is they’re kind of market followers. “Well like, okay.” They’re trying to meet the demand. They wouldn’t just indiscriminately do it but you get the point I’m trying to make. We see the health of people getting worse. A doctor I was talking to, a good guy, he said to me, ”Reed, you know we’re ranked 38.” He goes, “In terms of health, United States had ranked second from the bottom of 48 civilized countries or whatever. Like that.” We’re ranked second from the bottom. Why is that?
[37:42] Ashley James: But we spent the most as a country, we spend the most on, they call it health care but it’s disease management. Yet we are basically getting the word results. If it was a country, if we looked at each country like a company, like a business. Like Amazon as a business. If Amazon was spending the most amount of money, and getting the second to last worst results like in terms of sales retention whatever. They would fire the CEO immediately and completely restructure their business or they’d go out of business. But because it is a for-profit business, there’s no sense. They don’t want to change it because they’re profiting. They’ll say, you’ll see that statistic like if you’re a type I diabetic or if you’re an insulin-dependent type II diabetic, they’ll say the cost to be a diabetic is $12,500 on average per person per year. They make it sound like it’s a cost to the country. Its cost but in fact, it’s profit. A diabetic is profiting the industry that doesn’t serve us that is not getting results. Why would they want to change? They’re profiting? Right? But we are the people as individual we are the ones getting screwed over because we’re getting the second to least results compared to all the other countries but we could go to a different country, spend less on health but you know that would go costly to fly or drive to a different country depending on where you live. Here we are. We’re stuck. But we have to do something different, right? We don’t want to leave the country we’re in for health care although some people do called medical tourism. So here we are. We have to understand that the system we have gets the second to worst results yet we pay the most for it. We have to understand that we’re stuck with that system but we’re not stuck with needing to go to an MD for absolutely everything. We have to understand like you pointed out, wonderful people to go to for certain things and for healing opportunities go to an allied practitioner like a health coach or naturopathic chiropractor. I don’t know about calling a Naturopath an allied practitioner because they’re legitimate doctors but they see it through a different lens.
Going to someone other than a doctor that’s just going to prescribe drugs. We need to take our health into our own hands. That’s why the listeners listening right now. So they can become educated and they can be highly informed and advocate for their own health. I will say one final thing on this, I say it often but we have new listeners all the time. As I’ve done all these interviews which I’ve done over 370 interviews for the last few years, it dawned on me somewhere along the line that if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. The statistics right now, I believe it’s 1 of 3 people would get a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. One in 3 people are obese. Or you know, overweight in an unhealthy way. One in 3 people have diabetes or pre-diabetic. And then you look at heart disease. My dad died of heart disease. My mom died of cancer so both two topics close to my heart. That we can help the listeners prevent it. Heart diseases is 100% reversible and preventable. I interviewed Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn a cardiologist who’s in his 80s who still practices today helping people reverse heart disease with diet. The point in this is that we could take action but we have to remember that we need to be summoned swimming upstream if we do what everyone else is doing, we’re going to be statistic. We have to be a little bit controversial. Right? Go get some lab tests done that a regular doctor would scoff at maybe. Change your diet, change your lifestyle. Look at that stress. Look at exercise. Look at all the things that the average person doesn’t in order to live along healthy life without disease. I’m so glad you’re going to outline some great actionable steps we can take today, you created the DRESS for success system to help people see that there are pillars of health that they could take into their own hands every day. To build their health and then using the abs, you look for healing opportunities to target what the body is saying it needs to focus on.
[43:23] Reed Davis: Exactly. That was a mouthful and very good. You were a change maker. Someone’s going to help change this system. Let’s just say the two systems can both exist. Again, it’s not like a wave to eliminated allopathic medicine we just can let that team have control over everything and us because they will just make us consume. We’re just going to be consumers of their stuff. The province of Ontario, we’re both from Ontario right? in Canada. I heard statics recently in the last couple of years, by 2020 60% of the entire Ontario government’s budget. 60% of the budget will go to healthcare. By 2025 or somewhere in there, another 10 years, maybe 20 30 even it will be 80% of the entire government’s budget will just go towards healthcare. Now everybody’s going to be on a the medical dole if you will. Just for all the money’s going to go. It’s a system where you’re right, there is greed and a lot of profit motivation for this. The people who are in the receiving end of the check, like government’s writing the check, who’s getting the check? Who’s getting paid? We want to change people’s thinking. I also just want to throw in that what we do is for profit also. I learned to make a living helping people. It’s an honest living though. It’s doing work, it’s very rewarding that does some good in the world. It will be a legacy, it will be passed on. You and I are of the same elk we’re working together to affect those kind of change and you don’t do it by going along with the pack. You do it by doing somewhat controversial. At least, can’t I ask some questions? Like if you go to a physician, he says, “Yes. I found your problem. You’re hypothyroid that why you’re tired and constipated and gaining weight and can’t lose it, your hairs falling out and you feel sad. It’s hypothyroid. Here’s your medication.” If you say that, “Doctor, why is my thyroid underactive?” We don’t know it’s idiopathic.
When you hear that word, idiopathic means, it means they’re not looking for the answer. It really means, “We don’t know but it means we’re not looking because that’s not how they operate. It isn’t by the way just the drug companies, it’s insurance companies play a huge part in it. That goes back to original comments Ashley about physicians feel like they’re wearing handcuffs. They can’t say anything else. They get reprimanded by their board. If they’re selling supplements, their office are doing some of these things, alternative stuff insurance doesn’t pay for it. They can get a letter to cease and desist or we’ll take your license away. How many are brave enough to say, “Go ahead. Take it. I’m going to do some good in the world and you can keep it.” They’re not just brave at this point. There’s got to be another system not to replace it but to operate side by side that can end up being a bigger system. The one that the people choose when the people go to. I’ve been a working-class here all my whole life. I’ve always admired them anyway. I actually do right to Harley Davidson through the mountains of California at least three times a week and try to do some good in the world and enjoy the lives that walk the talk. I can’t say profits are a bad things I’m just saying you can make an honest living helping people if you want to. That’s a big part of my course is showing other people to of this as a profession. Most people would sign up to their own health and their families. They just want to learn, it’s very affordable. I do this post-grad interviews and I always ask every single graduate in my program I personally interview and I have for 11 years. I have done thousands of interviews that’s “Why did you take the FDN course? What did it meant to you?” Way more than half would say, 75% say, “My own personal health challenges have been completely resolved, partially resolved. I’m working on it. I’m on my journey I felt so much better. I can’t wait to share it with others. I’m going to go out there and now I’m going to do this for a living.” Or we’ve had people start their business, augment their business or shift from whatever they were doing for living to doing this for a living. It’s okay to make money, as long as you’re doing some good in the world in my opinion.
[48:22] Ashley James: It is not evil. I want every single one of my listeners to live a life that they absolutely love and be well taken care of. To have the means to have the amount of money that provides them with the ability to live their dreams. Money is not evil, it’s what you do with it. You have to give your money, I just paid my bills today so I just paid our health insurance and we don’t buy the most expensive but we don’t buy the most cheap. I always buy the one that covers holistic medicine but we’re nowhere reaching our deductible because we obviously use it a bunch but we do go to our Naturopath, to our chiropractor, acupuncture. That kind of thing. It’s $1,500 a month for the three of us for our family. Last year it was a different plan, it was $1,800. I’m like every time I pay it, I just feel resentment. I feel frustrated. I think to myself why don’t I just not have health insurance and then just save some money or put aside then there’s all these diff options and I’m so obviously like I do the podcast and I’m a very hard worker and I get this podcast to help as many people as possible. That’s a huge percentage of our income goes towards medical expenses for a system that is broken. For a system that isn’t getting results. Right? If this system was designed, if every practitioner had your course, every practitioner in the entire world, even every MD knew what you taught and they practice what you taught, our medical bills would be so small it would save us so much money. Every time I pay it I feel resentful because I’m paying a system that doesn’t work. Now I absolutely have id be overjoyed to pay a functional medicine practitioner and I want them to profit because they get results.
It’s about results. It’s evil when you have to give something or a company you have to pay some money to something that gets very poor results and you feel like you’re ripped off. It’s more about feeling ripped off whereas with functional diagnostic nutrition, I know it gets results. Just like seeing a Naturopath I know I’m going to get significantly better results than seeing an MD for certain issues. You want to go the right practitioner from the results you want. I think that’s just really important to understand that there are these allied practitioners out there. I’ve had listeners contact me that said, “I never knew that Naturopaths existed until I listen to your show.” They just didn’t know. Because that’s not part of the mainstream I guess, Hollywood right? And TV and media. The media we consume growing up is all about ER and Grey’s Anatomy and there’s no show following acupuncturists around. I think that’ll be hilarious. I definitely want to get into understanding a bit about the tests. That if you could give us some examples of lab tests that people when they take your course that they learn to order both for themselves and also for their clients and to just give us a contrast compared to like what someone would get when they go to an MD versus when they’re going to a functional diagnostic nutritionist?
[52:09] Reed Davis: Fantastic. The place to start the labs is how do you think about it? It’s really a state of mind or we call it FDN a methodology. Methodology is a method with a way of thinking attached to it. There’s a philosophy or a state of mind that’s required. Since for non-physician, we can’t diagnose and treat conditions. That would be practicing medicine without license. We don’t want to. We want to just get the underlying causes or conditions. They’re not always identifiable the so called root cause. You hear people talking about this. You may never find the root cause. It could be really well hidden or there just isn’t enough test. There’s no test that’s for sure. It’s not that this blood work that they’re running. We might be 50 or hundred years away to a blood test that tells you everything if it ever happens. We’re definitely not in a land of Star Trek where I don’t know if you remember Dr. Macoy had that little thing and he would wave it over the patient’s chest and then “Oh, it’s this or that here’s your shot of whatever” and that was really allopathic even though it was supposed to be way in the future. Those things don’t exist. The root cause may be very hard to determine but you can still have an effect upon it. That’s the thinking that you can have an effect upon the root if you can just get close to it. People are coming again on that second they’ve been told by their physician that there’s nothing wrong with you or you’ve got this or that and here’s your pills. Let’s treat the paper. They’re in a cycle of trial and error. Those people where they do? They go online. They’re going to get a million hits on any condition they put in. You type in diabetes or thyroid or digestion disorder. Whatever it is. You’re going to get a million of things to look at. Or you go in your neighborhood and you find there’s a guy down the street doing even Naturopaths and so they do a diet program, they’d do an exercise program, they do a supplement therapy. They do some other therapy with some gizmo and they’re making a ton of money kind of praying on people’s discomfort. People are stuck in the cycle and they get pretty desperate.
They just want someone that can help them. They’re spending a ton of money, people are making a ton of money but it’s really not filing the needs and the way we know that is people still walking around with all other problems. If something besides what we do and we’re just catching on really work then all these other people would be out of business. That would be part of my objective is to get more people doing what really works. Anyway, so you got this way of thinking that there’s an underlying cause or condition and how close can we get to it. We can’t give them medical diagnosis and we don’t want to. I have one diagnosis and you might have heard this I call it metabolic chaos. There’s just things wrong going the body. Everyone has different weak links in metabolism. There are thousands and thousands of metabolic processes going on in the body 24hrs a day. Most of them under control of the autonomic nervous system. Your sympathetic and parasympathetic balance of course and all these other things going on. There’s this idea that if symptoms incurred somewhere downstream that’s just another problem is showing up. Upstream from that is dysfunctional and misprocesses and above that is just what I call is metabolic chaos. Things are not working the way they designed it to work. The design is perfect you don’t have to teach these cells what their job is certainly. You don’t have to teach any tissue what kind of tissue it is. It knows if it’s a brain tissue or adrenal tissue or muscle tissue whatever. All the cells, tissues, organs and systems, the what their job is it’s just being interfered in some way and not supported in some way. Everyone’s so different that the opportunity for voids in that system for weak links is just really abundant. There are just millions of things that could be going on. Some of them all at once. We have one diagnosis. It’s metabolic chaos. There’s stuff going on. Our way of looking at it. This is just the discoveries that I’ve made.
Ashley, I’m answering your question now. I ran five labs in every person. And it’s because all the people I try to help, we start with a lady who had low bone density and then what helps with bone density, the hormones, we start testing hormones. What I found out just by working with people, sheer numbers. The people who had low bone density when we worked at their hormones, not only could we help them with their boned density but they felt better. They got more energy, their brain fog went away, their sex drive came back, their weight normalized, their immune system improved but still it wasn’t quite whether something else – I learned to check for hormones in every person using saliva testing and we checked the immune system. You can use saliva testing for that. Which I found out that when I ran another test, we call the metabolic assessment profile which is a urine test. We checked digestion to make sure they’re actually breaking down and absorbing food properly and that leads into dysbiosis and things going on in the gut that just aren’t right. Also detoxification. Is the liver clearing the blood that we’re supposed to? Three pints of blood a minute go through the liver. Three pints a minute? That’s a lot of blood flowing through your liver and most of that blood is supplied off of the digestive tract. There is some blood coming in the rest of the body to the liver through an artery but the rest of it comes it sort of drained off the digestive system. You got all these things going on. Again, you can make observations. You can collect saliva, you can collect urine, you can collect stool and you can collect blood of course. And start making observations.
This happened over a long period of time. I ran a ton of labs and I narrowed it down to what would give me the most healing opportunities for the money. People are going to invest, they have to pay me my professional fees and they have to pay for the lab work. It sounds like where am I going to get a lot of people who do that? they’re everywhere because people are sick. They’re sick and tired of being on it, the cycle of trial and error that they’re in and will spend out of their pocket. Last year you said you’re spending over $20,000 a year on what’s so called health care like insurance and it doesn’t even cover the kind of health care that you want. It really covers like emergencies that’s not a bad thing. Maybe you should buy insurance that only covers emergencies for $5,000 a year. That’d be reasonable. The rest of the money you spend it where you want. On care of the human frame or on diet and the causes and prevention of disease. You could spend it a little better and execute everything cover that you want for your 20 grand. That more than some people make by the way. Some families of three or four people. At least in this country. You got this mindset. It’s a methodology, it’s a step by step process. I ran those five labs in everyone. Hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, healing opportunities, energy production, and nervous autonomic balance. Sympathetic and parasympathetic have to be balanced for your body to function, right? We look for these opportunities. Now some person we might find 10 things to work on, another person five someone else, 15. It just depends on the person. Everyone is different. Everyone has this vital voids or weak links in metabolism. Again, we’re not diagnosing or treating some specific disease look here’s what’s wrong with your body. If you fix those things, then downstream what you see in your doctor for hyperthyroidism, irritable bowel or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or brain fog, cloudy thinking all these things. That stuff should go away if we fix everything upstream.
As a matter of fact you can remember it like this the word hidden. I call them the hidden stressors and dysfunctions. Hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system balance. H-I-D-D-E-N. Easy to remember right? Yes. H-I-D-D-E-N, the hidden stressors, and dysfunctions. You ran some small handful of labs, they’re not that expensive you can get them done and you have a professional. I’ve trained almost 3,000 people. I’ve trained those for you because everyone’s an individual and it matters whose test results are these. That’s another down side to allopathic medicine is everyone’s the same. All of their studies are on what’s called a cohort. No one person that it applies to it. On a group of 50,000 people approved lifespan by 20% with this drug. Of course, 18 of those people died from the drug and another 19 are permanently braindead or something damaged. You get the point? So we don’t work with cohorts. We work with individuals. That’s the other part of the methodology. It’s a method step by step it’s a way of thinking about the human body in each person individually.
We look for this healing opportunities in the HIDDEN stressors and dysfunctions that I just determine overrunning of thousands of labs on thousands of people will get you the best results. Will get you back to sleeping well. Get up feet on the floor running. You got lost of energy to get through. If you eat your breakfast, you know you’re going to have energy to get through to lunch get a lot of stuff done. Same thing between lunch and dinner and then you’re still going to have energy and clear thinking to enjoy your kids and all the stuff that we all want to do. It’s all high-quality life. Also preventative. My theory in anti-aging using that system, you should feel 40 until you’re 80. Anti-aging isn’t, you don’t wait until you’re 65. Look I’m 66 years old, think honest 20 years ago when I was pretty much abusing my body without knowing. I call it a well-used body. I’ve done some bad things to it but I was trying to fit in this methodology and also approach as an anti-aging tool. It will get you over the things that you’re dealing with that you don’t like about the way you look or feel. Without going to physician getting medical diagnosis and treating that specific thing with drugs or worse surgery. So once you do this assessment and it will include a very careful history taking of your complaints or the main ones you want to go away. How often those things bother you, how long has it been going on, what things you tried first, what’s your motivation running your life, you have to be motivated client for us to take you on. We would run those labs and then we would individualize the protocol, design a d-r-e-s-s program. Be very happy to go into the more details on the labs if you want. Like what hormones we’ll look at or what markers or we could go towards the DRESS program. How does that work? What are the specific questions?
[01:04:41] Ashley James: This is good. Let’s start with because I know my listeners are probably on the edges of the seat going, “Yes, tell us more of these labs.” We have a Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group and so many times people are asking about labs by we have to have the right philosophy and mindset when looking at labs. We can’t be reductionist which is like allopathic medicine just looking at one thing like I’m going to look at the liver and that’s very reductionist just to look at one organ only. We need to look at the whole system because every organ affects the other. Every hormone affects, everything affects everything right? We need to look at everything as a whole. When you’re looking at thyroid and you’re looking at cortisol and liver and digestion and energy and sleep and all these. What I’d love to know if you could give some examples of labs or what are the absolute must labs that you always run with people. Of course it’s individualized because one person comes to you and their health history is all about digestion the other comes to you and it’s all about headaches and maybe nervous system stuff. doesn’t seem related but you dive in deeper and absolutely could be related because again, everything affect everything in the body. Please explain more about these labs that people learn to run in the functional diagnostic nutrition course and learn to run on themselves and their clients.
[01:06:16] Reed Davis: Again, back to the early days of doing the bone density testing. One I was finding is that I should look at hormones at every person. I was doing it just specific to the bones but I realized after a while testing enough people, that “Wow. This is critical for all kinds of reason not just how it affects the body.” Just what you just said, it affects everything. We run a saliva test. We take a morning, noon, afternoon, nighttime saliva sample. We look at cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is your stress hormone. You could look at the pattern of cortisol and DHEA which is a counter regularity to your stress hormone. You have stress hormones which are catabolic and it breaks your body down. You’re under stress and then you have the anabolic beginning with DHEA, that’s the parent of your sex hormones, so that’s your anabolic. You need catabolic and anabolic balance. The bodybuilding up and the body breaking down. There’s a normal amount of each. Does that makes sense? Let’s look at catabolism. We find people that are overly catabolic. They’re cortisol dominant. Their bodies are breaking down. It’s not like you’re going to treat the paper like “Oh, here’s something for the other side.
We’re not just going to prescribe or recommend. There’s supplements that can do that. You can treat the paper even in naturopathic medicine. We start obviously what? Looking for the stressors. Why are you in this catabolic state? Is it just mental-emotional? When I say they were stressed? What do people think? They hate their boss, their kids, god I don’t know. They have mental-emotional stress but there’s also physical trauma and things like pain. Walking around in pain is very stressful. The body responds the same to either thing if your neck hurts its response is catabolism. Cortisol dominance. If you are in a fight with your spouse all the time it responds the same way. Also the same thing with internal hidden stressors that dysfunctions in your bodies that occur over time or parasites, bacteria, funguses, viruses or food sensitivities, and things. Environment influences, new draperies can cause hell in the household because the outgassing of chemicals and fire and other things. What we do is we look at that to assess the cortisol DHEA ratio as a marker for catabolic anabolic balance. We need to get this in balance or nothing else matters. Why treat one little thing downstream when we can go upstream to a major factor like that. Oh, by the way instead on a pathway of investigating the stressors and some of that again, requires the investigation, the intake, careful history taking and things. A person might have a hobby that’s actually hurting them.
They’re spray painting little figurines in their garage sucking up paint spray, that’s not a good thing. Anyway, you get the point, there’s investigation involved including the lab work. We can look for food sensitivities, parasites, bacteria, fungus, viruses and things that they don’t even know is there and physicians are looking for the most part. We look at a major thing like hormone balance. The catabolic anabolic hormones and also while you’re doing that. As long as you’re collecting saliva, one I look at the sex hormones because estrogen need to be in balance with progesterone in women testosterone needs to be balanced and we can even look at melatonin. That’s not a sex hormone but that’s hormone that’s important we can get that from the night time sample. We can do a morning, noon, and nighttime evening – morning noon, afternoon and night time saliva sample. Get a lot of information and frankly again, standard physicians don’t recommend tests they’re not looking for that. They’re looking for disease. They’re looking for a way, cholesterol or whatever it is that they’re looking for deepening on your complaint. That’s some pretty important test. Saliva test to cover those things. Again this was just one of the first tests I started running because I was looking for a specific thing like bone density but I found out the ramifications of it by running thousands of it and giving those same people things to do. To look at the stressors, let’s run some more labs and narrow it down to these five labs. That’s one. It’s a hypothalamic pituitary adrenal stress indicator type test. We’ll also run by the way saliva’s easy to collect at home and send in at your convenience and it’s not really expensive so it’s a good investment as is this urine testing that we do.
Again easy collecting at home. We look at that digestive marker. Are you breaking down protein? By what you collect in the urine. You can see how well a person’s breaking down protein. If you’re not breaking down protein, I see amino acids. Amino acids turn into neurotransmitters. Think of all the ramifications of having neurotransmitters are out of balance. Your moodiness, your irritability and all the other things that are going on in your body that require good neurotransmitters. The other things that amino acids are good for like they’re the building blocks of all the enzyme and tissues in your body. Things like that. It’s remarkable how important breaking down protein is. That same marker, if you’re not breaking down protein, how well do you think you’re breaking down your carbohydrates and your fats? There’s other ways to look at that but it’s a great test and on the same lab, the same urine sample, again we’re trying to get the most bang form the book. We can look at oxidative stress. What’s another indicator of excessive stress at some form toxins or something in your environment. You could be over-exercising, you could be smoking, you could be exposed to other toxins or you could get internal toxic producing organisms or processes. So we look at oxidative stress. Basically if you cut open an apple, it turns brown, right? That’s oxidative stress. Oxygen, free radicals, and excess of that is a bad sign. It’s great marker as an overall assessment of health. Something again physicians just aren’t looking at because it’s an insidious long term contributor to chronic degenerative disease.
[01:12:59] Ashley James: I did not know that you could do urine testing to see your oxidative stress. That’s amazing. Just thinking about oxidative stress, one of the Naturopaths that mentored me he described, he’s a pathologist before he became a Naturopath, he says that cholesterol, the bad cholesterol is oxidized cholesterol, it’s oxidized fat. It’s not, it doesn’t cause disease in and of itself. It’s like saying, look over there there’s smoke. It’s the effect of oxidation. If you take someone who eats fries everyday like fried and deep-fried, that contributes hugely to oxidative stress to the body. Eating anything with oil and fried food. So that person would then have that. Have high levels of oxidative stress but also people are low in selenium for example because selenium recycles the body’s own glutathione which is our antioxidant and so I can see where your starting to put the puzzle pieces together because you’re looking at their diet and their lifestyle. If you see that their melatonin is low and that saliva test and that you see that their protein is low in that urine test you’re like, there you go because their melatonin’s low because they’re not getting the amino acids to the body needs to make the melatonin so you’re starting be that detective. Am I on to something there? Is that how it works?
[01:14:29] Reed Davis: Yes. I’m impressed with your knowledge of oxidative stress. It’s another form of stress that creates an imbalance between the free radicals and the body’s ability to counteract them. That’s why we take anti-oxidants and we include anti-oxidants in our diet. We need the vitamin C, D, and E and these things from food hopefully but if not, you can take some if you take excessive oxidative stress you want to increase the anti-oxidants but you also want to go, that started the immediate care idea. Again, we don’t want to just treat the paper or use the paper to sell supplements or supplement program. That’s another unfortunate occurrence but we want to find out why again it could be over-exercise, smoking or something else hidden. We would just use it with the detective mentality. Like here it is, here’s the problem, your oxidative versus anti-oxidative balance is off. You have an imbalance, let’s correct it. That’s a pillar as you mentioned that can be corrected with our lifestyle program.
The diet and supplements especially the right kind of exercise, getting the right amount of sleep all these things are critical. So far, we’ve looked at saliva testing, all the hormone, anabolic and catabolic balance, the balance between the sex hormone, getting a peek at melatonin which is I could fill in the blanks in there more, that’s a great anti-oxidant by the way. Most of us made in the gut, people aren’t aware of that. They think it’s just from the penile glands at night time, not true. You do this saliva test, you do this urine test, we said we can look at how well you can breaking down protein which is reflective of how you’re breaking down other things. It’s also reflective of the dysbiotic condition we find in people’s guts. Not enough good flora vs the bad flora. That’s where a lot of your protein that comes from. It’s the bacterial breakdown. We’re looking at that for a saliva, form a urine test on the same urine test, let’s look at the oxidative stress. From the same urine test, we’re going to look at liver function. It’s not the enzymes and things that physicians look at to see if you have a disease it’s just that it congest it. If you’re spilling this it violates and sulfates over into the urine, they collected by kidneys and excreted and we can measure them. If you have a congested liver like before the recording started, we talked a little bit about this scenario that you might want to work on. We see people are overweight there’s so much fatty liver around, it’s unbelievable. Liver it does a lot of things. A couple hundred different operations but if you just look at it as a vacuum cleaner bag collecting toxins and unwanted particles off the digestive track and wherever you’ve got to change your vacuum cleaner bag don’t you?
If you ever changed a bag in a vacuum cleaner the old ones that used to have bags you know that it runs a good vacuum cleaner when you changed that bag when it gets too stuff it’s not working, you put a bag in it, you get a brand new vacuum cleaner. The liver can be assessed that way. That what’s included in this urine test. We’ve only run two tests, we haven’t spent much money but we’ve discovered a lot of healing opportunities. The catabolic anabolic imbalances, the sex hormone imbalances, the low melatonin could be real problem point to figure out, gut dysfunction and things, we’ve looked at dysbiosis and protein and other food breakdown. We’ve looked at the oxidative stress, we’ve looked at liver congestion. That’s a lot of bang for the book and we haven’t given any medical diagnosis. I’m not playing doctor. We’re just being detectives trying to help people or ourselves figure out what’s really wrong. Where can I clean myself up in these upstream functions so that downstream I have to just feel better? I have more energy and I lose the weight. I have a better ability to build muscle, sex life, whatever it is to you that is not right about. The thing about the look or feel that you want to change. That’s only two tests. Another really important one I’d run just about everybody, depending on how they come to us and people come with all these metabolic chaos, they’ve got multiple complaints hardly anyone says it’s just my hangnail, if I had a little more energy I’d be better. They’ve got multiple complaints. Some of them walk around these things for years and years and years, they’ve seen 10 people already and everyone kind of picks and chooses. Try my therapy, try my little machine or my whatever they’re doing. Individual therapies and modalities. When that doesn’t work, you’ve got to start looking upstream and that’s what my entire system is abided on. I would look at gut function a little deeper. I like running an intestinal permeability test just to make sure that your villi and microvilli are in good shape. That you don’t have excessive permeability at the gut, things like that because it’s a healing opportunity. You can call it it’s all kinds of problems for a person. Just unbelievable amount of problems. Include eventually autoimmune conditions and serious stuff. That, by the way, is another urine test do it at home. Doesn’t cost a lot and you can get these markers and start doing the things that takes to repair the damage. There’s two of more tests as a matter of fact if you just ran those three you’ve got a hell of an assessment. “Wow, look at all the stuff that I can fix. Finally, someone has figured out what’s really wrong with me. How do I fix it?” Well, there’s a couple more tests critical in that process. Now we’re ready for the DRESS program but the easy way to shortcut like diet, for instance, is to run a food sensitivity test. We can get into the DRESS program now but the story hidden stressor is the parasites, bacteria, fungus. Those are all easily detectable on stool testing. There’s different ones, there’s microscopy, there’s microscope. There’s culturing you can put the stool in Petri dishes and see what kind of pus grows on it for bacteria or even yeast. You can also run DNA testing. There’s ways to look at the stool that are very informative. More healing opportunities like if you have bugs. You’ve got to get rid of them. You can go to doctor for that or people mostly are choosing to self-treat using age-old botanical treatments. More that are less toxic less harmful to the good bacteria and things. How do you like them apples so far?
[01:21:51] Ashley James: I like it. I like that its sounds really non-invasive. Saliva and urine test and stool test. All things you can do at home and mail in. There are mold and parasites, a huge problem that people aren’t aware of. Most people aren’t aware that they could live in several different states and they can actually take mold with them in their belongings and many houses in different states even out in the desert where you think, “It’s like humid here.” Absolutely, you can have mold in the dessert living in Las Vegas for example or living in the mountains. Mold is huge and it is a big problem for our health. I’ve had several experts on the show talk about it and it can cause so many different symptoms but obviously immune problems like if someone goes, “Man, I just catch every single flu and every single cold that comes around. I just feel like I’m always sick.” Something’s going on that your immune system is so taxed right now. What is going on? Parasites we think just because we have clean water and we wash our hands, we don’t live among filth like we did thousand years ago. That there is someone immune to parasites right because we live indoors where there is no mosquitoes biting us every day so we don’t think that insects, you know parasites are kind of like parasites if you think about it. Could bug us and you go outside and you can’t and you start to become aware that we are just animals.
We are animals that are a little bit more sophisticated but we are not impervious to parasites and all animals can get parasitic infections like we can get a bacterial infection. I’d love for you to just explain a little bit more about mold and parasites because even if someone had some health issues that are like persistent, it’ll be great to rule out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they discover that the root cause was mold? Or the root cause was a chronic parasitic infection? Wouldn’t that be wonderful because it’s so easy to manage versus everything’s’ out of whack, where do I start? Of course do the DRESS. Do the diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplements to fill in the gaps. Obviously a 100 % of the population would benefit from that formula but wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone suffering and it’s an easy fix, right? To dress mold and parasite rather than years of dialing stuff in and still suffering. If you could tell us a bit more about the parasite and mold testing that would be wonderful.
[01:24:50] Reed Davis: Okay, sure. In context with what I was saying the investigation, looking at these critical markers for balance in your body. Moving on to than what more specifically is part of the stress takes you this metabolic chaos going on in my body and the things that you can do like some of the testing to determine. Stool testing for parasites, bacteria, and fungus is common. I mean we test everyone for that, now you find things but there’s the issue I have with it people think, “Oh, I found your problem.” there’s people who caught on to that there’s parasites for instance or bacteria like H. pylori and these different things and fungi and things. They’re thinking that they found the problem. Take you back on the whole vitalistic theory. You were already sick for the most part before your symptoms occur. Your immune system would have to be pretty compromised before some of these very common bugs, by the way, if you look at some of the literature, they’re not even considered a problem, they’re considered commercial or sort of normal to have some bacteria and parasite.
You can make a mistake easily by saying, “Oh, your problem sounds like parasites.” See some digestive issues and things like that, pain in the gut or whatever. Diarrhea and things, it sounds like a parasite then you check and you pat yourself on the back “Yes, I found your problem, it’s parasite. We’ll get rid of it and you’ll be fine.” No, you have to heal the whole person. You have to heal their entire digestive tract and bring their immune system back to balance and order. It’s not as simplistic as, “Oh I found this parasite now I’m all better.” You might feel better initially but you’re going to get the next bug that come along if you don’t really repair the whole person. Mold is a little different because – by the way you can run a test it’s called H-E-R-M-I. The hermi test for mold in your house. That’s the sort of best test for finding out if you got the kind of mold that will make you sick and there’s no good molds for us has been exposed to especially when it turns into something you can inhale. If it turns that can be inhaled that’s a bad deal for anybody. We recommend certain people with certain conditions. If you want to learn a lot about mold, I would go to survivingmold.com. Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker is probably the world’s leading expert in that area of research. He’s really specialized in water-damaged buildings and the molds and the long term chronic effects and how to remediate the building mostly you just want to get out, get ways from it. Then what happens to the body, unfortunately, what happens to the body can be really kind of diluted and the testing can be more expensive and hard to get for what it does to your immune system and inflammatory processes in your body. It really wakes up some complementary pathways and it can be really hard to detoxify molds. It’s very insistent. It loves to just re-circulate. It’s a very hard to bind to get out of the body. Because they’re mold toxins, it’s not the mold itself they’re just toxins from the mold. There is what’s called the micro toxin test, you can measure for that. but it’s not our first-line test. I don’t just run a micro toxin test to people. We have to clean them up first.
The FDN program looking at the hormone, immune, digestive, detox so on is a grounding program to get yourself cleaned up where you should be better. You should be a whole lot better. I’m talking about just three months of doing our DRESS program. Doing our customized for your test results and your history. If you do that customized DRESS program, the diet, the rest, the exercise, the stress reduction, the supplementation. 90 days you should really turn the corner or made it a few steps up the ladder so to speak. Yes, I feel a lot better. Then we start getting into more insidious things that could be in your environment. We don’t chase the mentality we still just being good health detectives. I’m not a person automatically would just pick a test like a mold test. I have some good screenings for it. There’s a nasal swab you could do for more things that’s pretty cheap. But I wouldn’t just run as a first-line. I just hate this idea, Ashley, it’s never worked for me anyway to put it that way. To try to guess what the problem is based on symptoms, remember we’re trying to get ways from that. Because people, walk-in from regular doctor, regular Naturopath you know I’ve got this traditionally reliable cluster of symptoms that sound like thyroid. Or traditionally reliable that sounds like chronic fatigue you known whatever it might be, “Oh, let’s run a test for that.” unfortunately, they find something that they say I’d the answer to your problem. It’s hyperthyroidism and the doctor would write a prescription, Naturopath would sell supplements, helping to get the test results in range. You might even get the symptoms to a bit but something there is going to come back or new set of symptoms occurs because you haven’t really sorted out the chaos upstream. When the chaos or new set of symptoms appear if you just say, “Now, it sounds like low testosterone, run that test and yes, so now you have a person, yes, it’s your low testosterone. Now you’re on your thyroid medicine and your testosterone, what’s next?” It’s a new cycle of trial and error. Unfortunately, a lot of people do with mold, they focus on that one things. They don’t really address the entire person. Including all the stressors. The mental-emotional, the physical trauma, bodies that are all banged up. That hidden I would call that a major contributor to metabolic chaos. Mold really sucks. That’s my medical diagnosis.
[01:31:57] Ashley James: Very technical.
[01:32:00] Reed Davis: Yes. We’re speaking big terms here.
[01:32:02] Ashley James: I heard that parasite testing could be a bit more complicated because parasites can hide in the body. How do you account for that?
[01:32:12] Reed Davis: Well, they do. It’s not just parasite, it’s bacteria they like to hang out together. If you go back to what I said about it, even if you find a bug if you think you’re just going to take something and kill that bug and return to normal it’s unlikely. There are called biofilms which is where they hang out together there’s what’s called comsensing. The bugs know that the other bugs are there and they start hanging out together. They start not interbreeding but that becomes fertile ground for them to replicate to grow and even to mutate like fungus mutates. You can get so called would be called normal spores and things but once it take hold it can become very invasive. Punch holes in your intestines for instance. It can get really bad. What we do generally again, this depends on the initial intake like it’s really important to take the history. We have our own intake forms of things we use. Make sure that our clients are filling out a good number of forms. It sounds like a lot of work but probably isn’t going to take more than 15 minutes per from each form, each form that we have. People threw out three or four forms. It’s a good investment in helping us to number one, take stock of where you are today. As a practitioner that’s very important. we don’t want them changing their mind about what their problem was 3 months down the road. Like, “Hey, we’ve been working on your migraines and now you said you’re complaining about your toenail are swollen.” You’ve got to get a good history and make people stop and think where they’re at. You can grade those things too. We do that, that will have us then running labs and get people on the DRESS program and their problem start to fade away. We actually have a point system for those intake forms. Some might have 300 points or 90 days or 180 days, 6 months down the road. They’re down to like not very many points but everyone has some points in there what. So you got that which is both objective and subjective.
You got the lab work which is all objective. Periodly objective, it’s what’s really going on inside your body. Then you have progress being made. Let’s make a point here that no one sat at the top of the hill. I don’t know anyone with perfect health. I know everyone’s on a stairway towards it but I don’t know too many people that – I’ve arrived here I am on the top of the mountain but we’re all – some of us have more stairs to climb than others. We look up to the people who are sort of able to help us and guide us and we look down and we help those what more steps up we help people up. Like I personally, 66 years old. I’ve a very banged up body from sports, motorcycles and just surfing. Just things that I wrecked. Muscular skeletal mostly. Also during my 20s and 30s was exposed in a lot of chemicals in different profession. Different job I was in. I don’t know what exactly what did that to my liver. I’m always watching. I’m always working. Again, I have less stairs to climb than most of my clients and my students come along and same thing. We’re all just on a continuum of improving. I don’t know anyone at the top so just with that mentality, let’s look at what are the healing opportunities and what are the things that I can do and just I can answer more questions about the testing but I want to talk a little bit more about the DRESS program.
[01:36:12] Ashley James: Yes. We’ll definitely get into that. Absolutely. Before we do, I have one last question about labs and that lab companies. I’ve heard stories about how it can vary results can vary from lab to lab. Do you have one company you work with? Or do you have handful companies like Doctors Data for example? Or Great Plains labs? Do you have handful that you’re like, I really find that these labs are the best in terms of results or do you have one specific lab that is just the best? I’d love for you to shed a bit of light on that.
[01:36:49] Reed Davis: The answer is it depends on what you’re testing for. There’s no lab that’s a specialist in every kind of testing or for everything. They are companies all they do is genetic testing. That’s all they do. You can even just run the 23 in me and then do what’s that cheap and then you can run it through various software. There’s one called Prometheus that I like but there’s other. The hard thing about my job is that no stuff coming out all the time. It’s hard to be on top of every new discovery and research and things that are going on and half of them could be junk because there’s no end to the amount of money being spent in this industry. So I do my best to vet out things and there’s a company called Bio Health Laboratories. I’ve been using them for20 years because I think they do the best saliva testing for that HPA access stress profile. I think they’re the best. I mean the quality and the quality assurance. I’ve been working with them for 20 years and I’m actually clinical advisor on their clinical advisor team. Great Plains you mentioned them, they’re a great lab. I use them for the micro toxin testing. They also have a finger stick test for food sensitivities. It’s not the best food sensitivity test but there’s nothing else around it can be shipped anywhere in the world. You prick finger and you put drops of blood on the blotter and you send it in the company. It doesn’t have to be frozen or anything like that. It’s stable for a week in the mail would be okay. You get a rough idea of the foods you’re sensitive to, it helps fine-tune your diet. You mentioned Doctor’s Data. They’re a good lab. By the way, this bio laboratories does an excellent stool test for pathology. Is there other stuff you could run the stool test for? Yes. Bio health doesn’t run those other parts of the test. There’s DSL which is a good test. They do DNA testing on stool. So to answer your questions, it’s various labs depending on what you’re looking for.
[01:39:04] Ashley James: You’d want DNA lab testing on stool because you’re DNA testing not for human DNA? Your DNA testing for parasites? is that correct?
[01:39:11] Reed Davis: The bugs, yes.
[01:39:12] Ashley James: Okay.
[01:39:13] Reed Davis: Yes but the mere presence of their DNA this is why I like some other testing isn’t telling you really have virulent it is. When you run a stool test and you culture, they take the stool and they shake it up real good and they mix it with a couple of things and it becomes a puree and then they are able to put it in these Petri dishes. They could grow eight different dishes with different mediums or EGAR in each dish, put it in an incubator for a few days and see what grows. Depending on the medium, you get growing different pusses. If there’s little bit of pus or a lot of pus that could make it a difference in your individual assessment of that person and what they need to do next. Also microscopy. There’s sometimes just looking through these high-powered microscope just having a really good lab rat. That’s his or her job and she just sits there and looks for bugs or bug parts and that will fit. Sometimes a human being involved it’s very important. There’s various types of stool testing and DNA is branded about as the ultimate best because it’s looking for non-human material and by the way you can look for that same test looks for other markers that could be reflecting how well you’re digesting things, how much pancreatic enzymes you have. There’s a lot to skin the cat. Once you’re trained in the basics and you can start to look in the finer details and individualized the labs you choose for each individual person. Again, it’s never about the test results, really it’s whose test results are these. That’s part of the methodology and mentality. Yes, I’ve compared a lot of labs like oxford biomedical for food sensitivity testing, they run what’s called the mediator release test. Unfortunately, it’s not covered by insurance and most of this isn’t because even though that test has been used for 25 years. It’s still called experimental by insurance companies. Why? Why because they don’t want to pay for it. Remember I told you about the miracle case Susan about depression and she’s got the hives for 2 years and she has been on this anti-inflammatory that made her gain 40pounds. That’s the test I ran and found her problem. Now I ran it on every person. Do I always hit home runs out of the park by running that test? No, because people are going to have food sensitivities and it’s the major factor in their problems like migraines. I’ve seen migraines gone but no other people the food sensitivities aren’t that big of contributor to the metabolic chaos. They’re minor contributor to the metabolic chaos that is producing the symptoms downstream.
For one little boy I’ve got to tell you, this is way back in the day. A lady was in for chiropractic and we’re talking your own health says, “I just wonder if you could help my boy, Billy. He’s 9 or 10 he’s always in trouble at school. They want to put them on drugs for ADD.” They have teachers diagnosing in the classroom. They want to put him on drugs for ADD because instead of paying attention to the teacher, he’s paying attention to the gardeners working outside or something. It’s telling something with this little boy. Anyway, we just did that test on that boy, got him off certain foods. Some of them are obvious. The highly colored and sugared cereals and all that stuff. Guess what, in two weeks, the principal of the school tracked me down and said, “What did you put Billy on?” “Listen, I didn’t put him on anything.” I ran a test got him off crap and now he’s a better-behaved kid. Things like that to you and I Ashely, that’s just common sense but it’s not always common practiced. That’s why I love labs. They just get into the degree that finding is contributing to metabolic chaos is to a degree to choose full in reversing the metabolic chaos and creating order especially in that hormone, immune, digest, and detoxification and so on and those areas.
[01:43:50] Ashley James: I love it. I’d love to know you mentioned earlier sometimes we’ll never find the root cause but we’ll be able to help the person. For example, my son who was having asthma, he’s so healthy and he eats so healthy and I’m thinking, “What’s going on?” We changed pediatricians. We went form, of course, naturopathic pediatricians. We changed pediatricians and the one we went to, the new one goes her first after being hospitalized twice for asthma. She goes, “Why don’t we do food testing?” That’s her first response like, “We should be testing him for allergies.” I’m like, “Wow. Thank you.” I brought it up with the first pediatrician and she was like, “Well, you know that’s down the road.” I’m like, “What is going on?” she started telling me that it’s normal for kids to be sick and to have asthma and it’s just like weird. It’s what some doctors will say and sure enough he’s allergic to 7 foods, garlic, fish, almost every single kind of fish like it will set him off. Eggs, avocado, things that we would eat every day. Like he would eat avocado, ate it every day, garlics and everything. A handful of other foods. Things that we also would avoid like Wheat, dairy and oats. He was allergic to and if he had any exposure to these food, he’d have asthma and dust mites. Dust mites are easy to manage but these like garlic is really hard. All of his food is made at home, cooked from scratch or I totally have to be diligent with looking at the ingredients but I’m wondering so now he doesn’t have any asthma by the way but if has any exposure, he starts to get a little wheezy and then we go, “Okay. Now we got to be diligent.” But that’s if there’s an early warning system. His body lets us know, he starts coughing he does a little bit of wheezing. We really make sure we vacuum twice a day. That kind of thing. Make sure that his food is 100% clean in case he accidentally ate something contaminated with eggs or with garlic. I’d love to know, what causes people to have these food allergies? Like you said, we may not ever get to that level of root cause but in your testing, do you see something that says like do you see that “Oh, here’s leaky gut, and that’s what causes.” Do you see that there is evidence for something even deeper than food sensitivities that causes them?
[01:46:25] Reed Davis: Yes. Again, there are inborn errors in metabolism. Their weak links in metabolism much of them are acquired but some are inborn and there’s this, you just have to use the word milieu of factors. That why I use the phrase metabolic chaos and the root cause exactly may not be known or discoverable. It’s too far upstream. There’s not a test. The test sometimes is getting off of food and seeing if you feel better. That’s a really good one.
[01:47:04] Ashley James: Yes, because there’s no side effects.
[01:47:07] Reed Davis: Yes and there’s no diagnosis in the food sensitivity. I coached football for 15 years. Youth football. And I can remember this is again, early on which made me so proud and know that I was hitting in the right direction. I didn’t have it all figured out. Same test, I have a kid, the mom always come up the boy “He can’t practice today on Wednesday.” I said, “Well, he’s not going to play Saturday then. You know if he doesn’t practice he won’t know the play. He had to sit out Saturday.” and she’s like, “Oh but he’s got asthma.” I said, “Well, what are you doing about that?” “Oh, he has an inhaler and he takes his inhaler.” “But we don’t allow those on the football field.” and I just “Did you ran him tested for food sensitivities or anything like that? This kid within a very short period of time never had asthma again. I still see that kid around time sometimes. Now he’s a big strapping grown man with no asthma. It was so miraculous she had her other kids tested. Like, “I want to test my whole family.” “Oh, yes. Maybe That’s a good idea.” There’s this ways to be it’s a mentality that I think we’ve covered pretty well here. Always looking for the hidden contributor to metabolic chaos and to the degree that the root causes are discoverable we can work on it. If it’s not discoverable if it’s just too hidden, we can still have an effect upon it, by getting what are the healing opportunities? What healing opportunities can we identify and my systems based on just years and years and years of observations. If you checked the hormones, immune system, digestion, detoxification pathways, energy production, which is I tell you about in a minute when we go to diet. Then of course again, this idea of autonomic balance. These six things that hidden stressors and dysfunctions are answering almost every case that comes in. Again, there are additional work to be done. Sometimes but they’re a little less common. So most people, all the common things that people complain about today that generally considered chronic degenerative diseases or conditions that’s our wheelhouse.
[01:49:39] Ashley James: I love that. And it’s such a big wheelhouse. Oh my gosh, pretty much the whole population can come see you and get results.
[01:49:49] Reed Davis: A guy’s called me up and he wanted to know if he should take the course. He’s a practitioner and he goes “I don’t know if I’ll find enough people to work on? Will it be enough people to work on? “ I said, “Where do you live?” He goes, “New Jersey.” I said. “No, there’s not enough sick people in New Jersey.” What a joke. There’s just you never going to ran out of customers. They’re going to pass by the way we have FDN practitioners spent the least amount in marketing because we get results and we all have referral-based practices. Too much long to talk at least about the D in the DRESS program and anything else you want. But diet is really one of the biggest questions. How many diets are there out there? A Hundred? A thousand? I don’t know. There’s no one of them that is right for every person. I guarantee you that there’s no one diet that’s right for everybody. What in the hell do you do?
By the way, this was something I spent a long time trying to overcome this question because I knew people had to go, you’re made of food how do I get people to eat right? I started off. It just happened to be the diet of the day in 1999 when I started this was Atkins diet. Everybody was on Atkins diet. Well, it’s making other people sick. Why is that? I want to know. This person does the Atkins and oh man, losing weight, feeling more energy and doing great. Another person’s like, “I got sick. I had no energy. I didn’t lose a single pound matter of fact, my skin flared up and I felt worse.” Why is that? Well, it’s because we’re all unique individuals with different, I’ll use this phrase here metabolic types. A metabolic type is simply, meeting your genetic requirements. We’re all from somewhere and if we all could go back, 500 generations which is a long time ago, you probably find your correct metabolic type and diet that goes along with it. If you’re Mediterranean, it makes sense. If you’re people today having the paleo diet which they think means eating more meat. Well, if you’re from the Anglo-Saxon, heritage eastern Europe and this kind of places where 500 generations ago, there was lots of hunting and gathering on and your people lived on deer and rabbits and muskox, mammoth or whatever. That’s just all about all they ate along with some local flora. Seasonal plant material and you ate just that and that was your heritage wasn’t mixed with any other heritage you probably would do pretty good from that. What if you’re from the island of Borneo. That diet would be horrible for you. There isn’t just one diet that is right for everyone but there is a way to discover it. There’s some principles involved in that way to eat that are really, really critical that I earned. I think it’s really important since I have the opportunity to share. There are things you need to know. You have macronutrients, protein, fats and carbohydrates. They’re the fuel that your cells burn for energy so that cell can do his job. The cells don’t have to be taught anything. They know what to do, they have innate intelligence, the same intelligence by the way that keeps the earth in alignment with the sun and the sun in alignment with the rest of the universe and everything like that. There is an innate intelligence that hangs everything together everything happening all at one time and you yourselves know that stuff. They know if their brain cells, muscle cell, adrenal gland cell of whatever. If you can fuel them properly which requires the right mixture of the macronutrients, the protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
You’ve heard of protein types and you’ve heard of Carb types and there are such things that people want to know, they’re called mix types. It had to do with the oxidative rate. The rate at which rate in quality and quantity of energy being produced on a cellular level. Energy is produced on a cellular level and it’s mostly dictated by the fat, carb and protein ratios. You can dial it in almost perfectly. There’d be some variations based on the time of the month. For women, seasonal variations for some people. Otherwise you can really dial in the correct fuel mixture for you because if it was just simple as either way your ancestors did 500 years ago, that was not available and guess what, people 12,000 years ago started roaming the world and we’re all just really interbred. These very few pure of this that or anything except of native tribes and they’ve been studied. A really big thing is protein, carb and fat ratios. Do you kind of fill me on that?
[01:55:23] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. I’ve looked at that in terms of how to get better results for people and you would change the ratios if someone was an athlete and wanted to get a different performance versus a woman who wants to lose weight that’s less active for example. You can adjust and play with those ratios, the gram of carbohydrates, fats, and protein to make the fuel mixture that your body wants. If you’re a sports car or a little minivan. Your metabolic needs are you were saying and your genitive pre-disposition but also the quality of a carbohydrates matter. Quality of protein, whether the protein is from something highly processed like whey or meat versus a protein broccoli. Just different quality of proteins and all of the nutrients that come with that food. We need to take into account as well. We need to know the highest quality of the fuel right? And the ratios are really important. But I love that you’re talking about getting those ratios in a healthy mixture for the body and not being extremist with this 80% or 90% fat diet sort of 100% meat diets where the ratios are way out of balance. Maybe in a short term someone could get good results. Anyone can lose 10 pounds changing their diets. It kind of shock the body, shock the metabolism but it’s what you see in the long-term, and I like that you’re looking at subjective and objective by looking in at how the person is feeling in their own skin. And the labs. Because over time you’re going to track a diet and see if you’re getting the results you want or not.
[01:57:22] Reed Davis: Well, that’s really well put. Let’s take little bit step further with this energy produced in a cellular level based on the carb, fat, protein ratios. We’re going to assume automatically that you’re eating really good high-quality food. That your beef or whatever your meat is organic. That your fruits and vegetables are organic as you can get. Not that they have so much extra nutrition in those fruits and vegetables but at least you’re not getting the herbicide, pesticide, and rodenticides all the different. You want to keep poisons to a minimum. This is what people start to write down in terms of “how do I know if that’s the right fuel mixture for me?” Number one, you’re going to be satiated. You’re going to feel satisfied. Your meal will feel like the right kind of the meal. You can start with breakfast, you can start with lunch, any day of the week you want. Just try to measure about an hour and a half or even two hours later, if you had a reasonably sized meal. What is your satiation? It is the principle of satiety.
If you’re not fully satisfied, if something’s missing, if you’re craving something then we would want to adjust ratios a little bit. No, I’m not feeling satisfied, it’s missing something. That’s not satiation. Satiation becomes a really important factor. Again, every breakfast and hour and a half, 90 minutes later, check three things. One the satiety, satiation versus cravings and hunger or something. Assuming you had a real meal in that. The next thing is energy. You need really good high-quality strong energy from your food. If it’s fuel for the cells and they’re producing energy to do their job you should feel energized and energetic. You should have enough energy to do the work or play that you plan to do until the next meal comes along. Which in case, by the way, should you feel a little bit hungry before the next meal, your blood sugar could be checked and things like that. Satiation is one, should feel satisfied. An hour and a half, two hours later you should still feel good energy. I’m not talking about the kind that you get from coffee where you feel kind of nervous to even do something but you feel tired underneath. Not that kind of energy really strong solid good energy, the third thing, these are worth writing down if you’re going to try to adjust your carb protein and fat ratios. The next one is sense of well-being. Believe it or not. You should feel good. If you feel really grumpy for not reasons that a sign that your meal may need some tweaking in terms of protein. If you’re grumpy and someone just cut you off at traffic or got fight at work, that’s kind of okay but if everything’s going wrong why do I feel grumpy or irritated or one of these negative emotions. Lack of sense of well-being in anyway, those three things are really critical and that requires you a bit of self-aware and pay attention and maybe make some notes so the next day you can adjust the ratio. There’s a lot more to diet but that’s some really critical factors. Again, assuming your food is high quality you’re not eating crap out of bags or boxes all the time. You want to eat real food. There’s stuff that’s on the outside the grocery store. I mean on the edges. Stay out of the aisles.
[02:00:04] Ashley James: Right. Stay out of the aisles. Go shop around the perimeter of the grocery store absolutely. I love it. Very cool. There’s so much to this but you make it simple and it’s a delight learning from you and I’d love to have you back on the show. Because we just really scratched the surface, I’d love to have you back to dive in. I know my listeners are going to love today’s interview. I know they’ll love to have you back. I want to make sure that people know more about your course. I’m going to take your course. I’m really interested and I know my listeners are right there with me. For those who want to check out the course, they can go to learntruehealth.com/FDN like as in functional diagnostic nutrition. So learntruehealth.com/FDN. Of course, that link is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Tell us a bit about your course. I believe when they go to that link they’ll get a discount to your program. That’s what it says and I’d love for people to know a bit about the program. It’s self-paced. It’s my understanding. Because we’re all busy. It’s online it’s self-paced. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
[02:02:18] Reed Davis: Oh sure. It’s quite a robust course as I mentioned earlier in the program. I’ve interviewed every person that ever took it. It started as a 2-day workshop and that was 11 years ago July so long time ago. I’ve just expanded and expanded what more can I do? What can I do to make it better? And every person gets asked and I’ve had a lot of honest people who told me “What if you did this? What if you did that?” I take all of their advice and I reiterated the course. Now it’s a full-blown course and first of all obviously the labs, all the investigative processes. The hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification. I teached them the anatomy physiology and biochemistry. For those who already know some of those stuff. It’s a great review. For those who doesn’t know anything I speak in very plain language and teach you what you need to know. There’s no fluff or frills or fill in this course. It’s all practical stuff. I’ve been told by people with masters programs and program said this is the most practical thing I’ve ever done ever. Because it’s just nitty-gritty stuff, all the physiology and stuff for around the lab work. You truly understand what you are testing, what are the hormones and other markers and how to interpret them based on an individual where we focused is on the case studies and how this is an individual test results. It’s not to treat the paper. That’d be easy to teach. I can teach you that in 10 minutes.
This is again, a robust course to take so it’s about 6 months or more to get through. I’ve had people do it in less but they must’ve had nothing else to do. It’s all that. Then, of course, it’s going to be case studies and interpretation. Working with individuals and yourself. You’re going to run those labs on yourself. I pay for two of them and as part of the course, I’m paying your way some of that internal investigation on you. You could take it just for your own health if you want to. That alone would be worth the price of admission. I’ll teach you all that and then I teach you all the protocols. The D-R-E-S-S program. We just ran into diet a fraction of what you might want to know. It’s how to get the right diet for each individual and the rest program and I teach a lot about sleep that’s really important and about the exercise. You just said some people are like drag racers others were like Volkswagens. The same there is no one exercise program that works perfect for everybody. You’ve got to know some things.
You might not be a personal trainer actually put them through these things. You actually teach your client or yourself the right way to figure it out. The diet, the rest, the exercise, the stress reductions is one of the biggest modules because there’s so much varieties and the types of stressors were affected by. Some of then I go back to my early days of the environmental work I used to do and what’s in the environment, other parts where food sensitivities other part that showed the things around your house. As a matter of fact, for people who just want to taste of how to deal with that area in their life, go to environmentalworkinggroup.com. It might be .org, environmentalworkinggroup. We get a lot of stuff about the environmental toxins and pollutants for them. So it’s diet, rest, exercise, stress, reduction. How to asses an individual in various stressors and there of course supplements. I don’t own my own line which I think is to my credit because I know I’m leaving a lot of money on the table not having my own line but I just have avoided that but in all about supplements I teach you what you need to know to support the body, to stimulate the immune system, to substitute what’s missing from food. For god’s sake. These antioxidants and essential fatty acids that we talked about the vitamins and minerals. That’s really important stuff. It’s now all the lab work and assessment and how to work with individuals and yourself. It all the DRESS protocol. What fixes everything? How do you fix every cell tissue system in the body at once? That’s the DRESS modules and then, of course, there’s the business modules like how to do this for a living. How to work with people? How to intake? How to make sure you’re working with a client is going to be successful? Guess what? Don’t let them hire you. I teach you actually how to select people who are going to be successful and make a good living doing this, doing the good in the world that all of us want to do.
[02:07:03] Ashley James: I love it. It sounds amazing. I took the IIN course. I really appreciate it because its focus is on the emotional mental health of doing health coaching. Of course, you learn the dietary theories of a hundred different diets but you don’t learn labs you don’t learn supplements you don’t learn nutrition. I’ve been mentored by Naturopaths for the last 8 years. so I’ve learned a great big deal about nutrition and supplements but what I loved about IIN’s course is a lot of it is the emotional mental work. I see that someone who’s graduated from IIN as a health coach would love to take your program because like you said there’s no fluff it’s a hundred percent everything you want to learn to then go out and work with clients. People who have never worked with clients could take your course and do a great job and people who do currently work with clients like IIN graduates. It would complement their continued education so well. I think it’s a wonderful complement. I’m very excited to take your program. Thinking about the cost of your program and thinking about the cost of seeing a functional medicine practitioner, for example, it’s about the same.
To see someone for six months or a year to work on a problem I could pay someone else. I could find local practitioner maybe graduate for your course and I could pay them and do the testing and pay them to look at it and asses me and help me figure out what I want to do. Or I could pay to take your course to learn it myself to do the work on me and be about the same amount of money but I would have that skill set for the rest of myself to continue helping myself for the rest of my life. You know some people are just at a point where maybe they don’t have mental clarity. I remember when I was very sick with chronic adrenal fatigue. I did not have the capacity to take a course. I was just at that point, where I just wanted someone to help me and maybe people they just want to find a practitioner that’s taking your course and go and work with them. For those who want to sort of be taught how to fish instead of just be given a fish, they have that skill set for the rest of their life then taking your courses is absolutely amazing because in the long run it’s going to save them so much money years to come they can apply these lessons then their selves and their family and loved ones. Then have that background potentially doing that as a career and adding that to their repertoire. Wonderful. I love it. Is it audio? Video? Tell us a little bit about the format of experiencing your course?
[02:09:55] Reed Davis: Well, it’s online for the most part but here are quite a number of head to heads, one on ones with mentors. Some of my best students that’s how I’m grown by the way from the original two-day workshop at 19 people, we now have close to 3,000 that we’ve trained. The course reiterated over and over again. The latest in relation is quite remarkable if I do say so myself. So you’re going to watch the lessons, you can download them to your computer though so you don’t have to be online. You could watch them on a bus or on a plane as long as you’re on your computer. There’s turnouts I have a I think a 180 different forms I give you including the legal documents and onboarding things. Ways to complete the assessment, develop the DRESS program and apply it to a person. The coaching method. You mentioned IIN which is a good school and just every other health coaching program or institute whatever it might be out there. There’s tons of now. I remember there was two or three so we’re one of the earliest been around the longest but there’s some good ones out there but I would consider them to be if they were a bachelor’s program, we would be the master’s program. We are the next level but I break it down in such a way and again I said there’s such a thorough for those who did know a few things it will be a great review for others who hadn’t been exposed you’d be good for everybody.
The only prerequisites are that you want to help yourself and others. You’re willing to walk the talk. If you want to help people and you want to walk the talk set an example, it’s an amazing opportunity to learn. If you only work for yourself and your family, it’ll be worth the price of admission. The fact that you could turn around and recoup your investment in a very, very short period of time if you follow my business model, it’s pretty remarkable and last but not the least, it’s a community now. It took on a life of its own years ago. Even the first-class there’s some alumni that still are they’re still doing things. The alumni group which I formed, officially we have an official alumni group we started two and half years ago. There’s hundreds of members. These are people who do this seriously for a living. Like we have convention every year now where we hang out and share. It’s really remarkable. I’ve been told by some of my mastermind people don’t start a tribe and not lead it. I’m here for the rest of my life to lead the charge. In my way just like Ashley is in her way, we all know what the goal is. It’s for health and wellness and happiness of the planet. If you go back to that quote from Thomas Edison, doctors aren’t getting there. They’re not evolving. As a matter of fact, many are getting more interested than just diagnose treat model. We have to present something to go side by side with that. The people really want that really get somewhere they want to go.
[02:13:10] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so excited. My listeners love reaching out to me and telling me how it goes for them especially when they become a health coach. Several have become health coaches as a result of listening to my show and hearing my journey through IIN. I’ve had three people email me saying that they were going to become MDs and they quit med school and they became Naturopaths instead. Because of my shows, they found their true calling. Which is so cool that people are finding their true calling through listening. I’m really looking forward to hearing in the coming weeks and months from my listeners who take your program. Go to learntruehealth.com/FDN and take your program and then have an amazing experience and then they’ll reach out to me and say, “This is how it affect my life. Thank you.” I love that they let me know how it went for them. I’m really looking forward to hearing the stories because your program is results-based and it’s all about results. It’s why you do all the labs. So that you could move the needle. So you can get results. It’s not just so you can prescribe a drug. Right?
[02:14:25] Reed Davis: Exactly. Yes, and the community is amazing it is what made us what we would call today group sourced. If your feedback from people is, “Well, that was great. What if you do this, what if you do that.” You actually have people listening including me. Where else can we take this? There’s new technology come on board all the time too. There’re new labs, new parts, new things that we can play with like the big thing today is wearables. The wrist bands and the rings and different things. There’s always something new that fits right in that I can’t be the eyes and the all-seeing. It takes a group to do something like this. To make it a true movement. I hope we get some great feedback even great ideas. That’s even better.
[02:15:16] Ashley James: I love it. Wonderful. My listeners have always been so impressed by them that they are a people that take action. They’re action-oriented people so I’m looking forward to you hearing the wonderful feedback as am I. definitely listeners go to learntruehealth.com/FDN to look into it. See more information and see if it’s right for you. I’m really excited to take your course as well and you know, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a hundred percent of the population knew this information? Could you imagine a world where everyone knew the labs that they could take to better themselves? If everyone knew like, “Wow. I have this symptom maybe I need to look at this direction” How self-sufficient would we be? It’s a big threat to the companies that don’t want us to be self-sufficient.
[02:16:17] Reed Davis: Yes, I think it’s called empowerment but it comes with self-awareness first and having a space in your own head or being to be at peace. You’ve got to know what that looks like and set goals for yourself. That’s what health coaches supported to do but it has to being with us. Again, the pre-requisites are you want to help others and you be willing to walk the talk. We are pretty self regroup, pretty high level of consciousness among most. We make money but we’re not in it for the money. It’s just so rewarding.
[02:16:58] Ashley James: Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you so much for coming into the show. Please come back. I’d love to dive deeper. There’s so many topics that you have to teach and I’d love to dive deeper. It’s been wonderful having you on the show.
[02:17:09] Reed Davis: Perfect. Thanks, Ashley. Happy to be here. Glad to come back anytime.
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