Nourish Balance Thrive

Clay is the fourth-generation owner of a Tennessee funeral home and never was there a guy more invested in his future health. Originally Clay approached me for help with tackling a yeast overgrowth, and boy, have we come a long way since then!  Listen to the audio or read the transcript for the full story as Clay's is an interesting and unusually complex case. Charging a friend money for something you'd happily do for fun is strange and difficult. We worked together as peers, and I couldn't be happier with the results.  No surprises that Clay is doing Bryan's Metabolic Fitness Pro biochemistry course. I think you should too. 

Dr. Grace Liu, PharmD, AFMCP, is a functional medicine practitioner with an international functional medicine practice that includes nutritional consultations, integrative laboratory analysis, and personalized counseling. I first became aware of her work last summer at the Ancestral Health Symposium where she presented the idea of an ancestral core microbiota. Over the past couple of years, I've been lucky enough to meet many gut experts. Dr. Liu is the first that can review a bacterial taxonomy from a fecal sample and give a meaningful research and practice orientated narrative. The taxonomy I have came from the results of taking part in the American Gut Project. A faster way to get hold of the data is uBiome. These tests are great if you're feeling pretty good. If you have any chronic health complaint, you will be better off first doing a test like the BioHealth 401H or Doctor's Data comprehensive stool analysis with parasitology. Dr. Liu's blog and podcast are fantastic resources for anyone interested in better understanding in the inner workings of the gut and improving their health. Look out for her next presentation at PaleoFX. In the interview, we mention the keystone species: Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Bifidobacterium longum and Akkermansia muciniphila, none of which I have! Prebiotics: glucomannan. Probiotics: Prescript-Assist.

We're throwing it back this week! Join Chris and Julie as they share a look back at the first year of Nourish Balance Thrive. The good, the bad, and the up and coming. See what happens when you change careers, start a new business, have a baby, and try to make it all work. Chris shares his story and walks you through what makes using this program so successful. Encouraging stories, business nuts and bolts, and ideas for the future, come along for a look back at an exciting year with Nourish Balance Thrive. 

Jordan Bryden is a gifted young triathlete from Alberta in Canada who came to me looking for help. In 2005, Jordan won the Canadian Junior National Championships and has since gone on to compete as an elite athlete. Now age 28, Jordan suffers from fatigue and insomnia and feels like his recovery is much slower than in his younger years. I'm certain that this is not just about getting older, and together we plan to use functional lab work to identify the underlying cause of the problem. This first interview covers some of Jordan's history, complaints, and challenges. Using a home saliva test, we measured Jordan's cortisol, DHEA, estrogen, progesterone, melatonin, and testosterone. We found hypocortisolism (full paper), also known as adrenal fatigue syndrome. The question is why? The plan is to continue the investigation with urinary organic acids, stool and blood testing. Click here to view Jordan’s results in PDF format. Are you a triathlete suffering from fatigue and insomnia? Book a free consultation and I’ll walk you through the solution.

Last July, Julie, Ivy and me left the East Bay and moved to Santa Cruz, a lovely town on the ocean and in the redwood trees. We love it, but ever since Mission Heirloom opened their new garden cafe in Berkeley, Julie has been finding reasons to make the 70-mile journey back home. If you ever get the chance to visit Mission Heirloom, you'll understand why. The level of care taken over the facilities and preparation is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and the food is out of this world. Better yet, it's portable, so if you live in the Bay Area you owe yourself this pleasure. In a nutshell, Yrmis Barroeta, co-founder says: Mission Heirloom is our intent to create a platform for people to carry on their health journey and elevate joy, elevate food and elevate performance. Everybody is different. Everybody has different dietary requirements. And we're here to support that. We believe that there should be different diets for different people, and that's what we're trying to provide. It's a safe space where people don't need to come to the restaurant with a million questions to feel safe or to figure out what they can eat. But find a menu that's very easy to navigate and filled with options for them.

Streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat) is a type of pharyngitis caused by a group A streptococcal bacterial infection. We’ve had a lot of people writing in to ask if they should be taking antibiotics to treat their strep throat. The concern has been more about the about the long term harm done by the overuse of antibiotics, but the potential complications of strep throat are serious. Knowing whether or not your sore throat is being caused by the streptococcal bacteria is key to determining treatment. During this podcast, Dr Busch mentions the 4 Centor criteria: (1) history of fever, (2) tonsillar exudates, (3) no cough, and (4) tender anterior cervical lymphadenopathy (lymphadenitis). Do you have a question for Dr Busch? Send it to chris@nourishbalancethrive.com

Christian Calma is a Research Coordinator, and Dr. Les Dethlefsen is a staff scientist in the Relman Lab at Stanford University. Dr. Dethlefsen studies the microbiota of the human gut, focusing on how it varies over time, and on what happens when it's disturbed when we take antibiotics or change our diet. I'm taking part in their study to further the cause and our understanding of how changes in the microbiota relate to changes in our health. I'm also excited about having all the data--80 samples over 34 weeks. There are three arms of the trial. The first will have no perturbations; the second will receive antibiotics (ciprofloxacin), and the third (my arm) will supplement with resistant starch and Go-Lytely® solution. The resistant starch should build the microbiota up, and the solution should knock it back down. You can find out more about the trial over at the Dynamics of the Human Microbiota website, and you can find out if you're eligible to take part by completing their online survey.

Equilibrium is a probiotic supplement that restores the dietary microbes lost as a by-product of widespread food sterilization. The product is a direct offshoot of research done at the NIH’s Human Microbiome Project, a $115 million dollar census of humanity’s gut flora. The data tells a clear story: as a society our digestive flora is dying off, and this lack of diversity has causal links to western stomach issues. Using a data-driven approach, General Biotics identified the groups of bacteria that are commonly missing from western microbiomes. GB then worked backwards from these data to locate missing dietary microbes that provide the needed function. In this episode, David Salamon, CEO of General Biotics and I mention: The American Gut Project Commensal bacteria protect against food allergen sensitization

Something a bit different for you this week. I want to talk the liver and some markers on a standard blood chemistry that can help predict the onset of fatty liver and Type 2 diabetes. Maybe you've noticed that your fasted blood glucose is consistently above 85 mg/dL. This elevation could be because your liver is not getting the message that there's sufficient glucose and is continually making it via a process called gluconeogenesis. The first paper I mention is Liver transplantation for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: New challenges and new opportunities. Pull out your old blood work and have a look at these two markers: ALT is an enzyme present in high concentrations in the liver and to a lesser extent skeletal muscle, the heart, and kidney. ALT will be liberated into the bloodstream following cell damage or destruction. Any condition or situation that causes damage to the hepatocytes will cause a leakage of ALT into the bloodstream. These would be exposure to chemicals, viruses (viral hepatitis, mononucleosis, cytomegalovirus, Epstein Barr, etc.), alcoholic hepatitis. AST is an enzyme present in highly metabolic tissues such as skeletal muscle, the liver, the heart, kidney, and lungs. This enzyme is at times released into the bloodstream following cell damage or destruction. Here are my numbers. August 2013 on the right in red (long after I was feeling better) and January 2015 on the left. Note that I'm always riding my bike and training, so I don't think the damage was due to that alone. Have a look at figure 3 in this paper titled Banting Memorial Lecture 2012 Reversing the twin cycles of Type 2 diabetes: Send me your liver questions to chris@nourishbalancethrive.com

Dan is an entrepreneur and researcher whose life’s work is how to facilitate health behaviors in others. He is the developer of Loop Model to Sustain Health Behaviors to help people live a healthy lifestyle in a modern world. He does research in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department at Stanford and the Departments of Neurology and Endocrinology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Follow him @dansplanhealth. I've wanted to get Dan on the show since attending the Ancestral Health Symposium in Berkeley last summer and seeing the compelling presentation How Quantified Self Technologies Will Help Us Live More Like Our Ancestors. Dan talked about how education alone may not be enough to enable someone to make a change and improve their health. Up until now education is most of what I do. I find problems with lab work, most of which is due to poor diet and lifestyle choices, and then I try to education the person so that the problem doesn't happen again. A better way would be to also give that person tools that would support better decision-making. Those tools are dansplan.com and the Ideal Weight Program.