#408: The Surprising Truth About Metabolomics, Stress, and Slowing Aging (Peptides, Heavy Metals & Foundational Health Secrets) With Gus Vickery

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidom. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices, to personalize interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bio-regulators. Enjoy the show. Hey folks, welcome back. I'm Natalie Nidom, your host. In today's episode, I sit down with my good friend Dr. Gus Vickery, and fair warning. I put myself under the microscope a little bit in this one. We walk through my own metabolomics testing, and what showed up after a stretch of heavy travel, stress, and me taking what I thought was a harmless break from supplements. Turns out, even when you feel great, your cells may be telling a slightly different story. We talk about mitochondrial health, nutrient depletion, and why foundational support isn't optional as life gets busier. 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The recetted deserves go to cozy earth.com and use code longevity for up to 20% off. And don't forget to mention this podcast in the post-curches survey. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, bio-regulators are not news to you. If you're new to the podcast, this may be a new concept. And I'm telling you now, this is one of the craziest, most cutting-edge concepts that's been around for decades that's so few people know about. And that concept are bio-regulators. Think of bio-regulators as seasonal upgrades for your body. Not a fix, not a hack, just foundational support. As the weather cools and routines change, your internal systems have to adapt. And we know that when they don't adapt smoothly, which they often don't do as we age, we end up feeling sluggish, foggy, or just a little off, even if you're doing all the right things. Now this is why I love nature's marvels natural bio-regulators. These are organ specific peptide complexes that support your body's own regulatory systems in a rejuvenative way. And there's decades of research behind these. Now this time of year, I'm especially fond of the liver bio-regulator, a gentle way to support the liver's detox pathways and metabolic flow. At a time when the liver is working overtime from the holiday goodies, delicious drinks, and stresses of the season, bio-regulators as a whole improve communication at the organ level, helping the body to do what it knows how to do, just like when you were younger and more efficiently. Now pro-tip, you'll want to stack that liver bio-regulator with the pancreas bio-regulator and the stomach bio-regulator for a full digestive support and renewal stack. I would do two capsules a day of each for 30 days. Now head on over to profound-health.com, use code NAT15 for 15% off your first order. Do it for a month. Let me know how you feel. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Guest Vickery. It is an absolute pleasure to have you back. Natalie, it is always an absolute pleasure for me to get to dialogue with you and hang out in an honor to be on your show. Oh wow. I can't tap. Poof. Blushing. Well, you know, the best part of doing an episode with you, it means we got to talk a whole bunch of times beforehand just to prep. I know. When it's been a long time since we cut up and there's so much going on out there, you know what I'm right? I do. No, I mean, you know what? You, but here's the thing, right? I'm out there kind of like the busy bee checking out all the different flowers, sampling different and your back at the hive, making the honey and the honeycomb and killing the invaders and wrapping them up in purpolis. She has not a bad way to look at it. No, it's not a bad way to look at it. Though, yeah, I'm glad you're out there scouting for all those new molecules that we can bring back to the hive and get better results. We're going to talk about today actually, primarily, is testing. We're going to get into some testing because while we both know the folks over at Therium quite well and they agreed that I would run my test and you and I would we're not deep diving into my results folks. So don't be whipping out your pens and pencils going, okay, which really going on under the surface. But we, we, I ran a test at the end of the summer, which was really enlightening. The results were not necessarily what I was hoping to see. But upon reflection, what I realized is I had taken, I did that thing where I took a total break almost from supplements and and got a little lazy. And so I think that it would be great to just talk a little top line about what you saw because so much of what we're seeing right now is we're encouraging people don't take too many supplements like cut back prune and there's a lot of wisdom there. But this really brought home to me and we're going to talk about it. This idea of foundational supplements and how they vary from person to person. So I'm going to let you kind of take it away here. But maybe you can just explain what you really noticed in these results, especially around the metabolites that reflect like the heavy travel, the stress, the sleep patterns of recovery, like all that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, the score was not what a superstar health expert like you with me. And it's not as so humbling of you to present this to your audience. But also, and we'll talk a little bit more about the implications of therium and where what is its role as part of a diagnostic survey, you know, in a little bit here. But we also had simple testing that you had had updated. And there was a gut test, which we might not get into too much, but it plays into that because we know how the gut biome and metabolites being produced via the gut metabolum are directly influencing how to congeal function. And so it's a system. We'll always say that over and over again as a system. Yeah. And I think what's important to note is when word of the discussion we're having and the results we looked at are the intersection of all three of those. There's no, it wasn't one test. That's right. And I think that's important. And one thing I want to really emphasize on theory, um, is it's primarily sold as a practitioner tool. Yes. And it's, it's a good, it's a good, there's a good reason for that. And that is that if you don't know what you're looking at and you don't know how to interpret it, you get really upset, confused and overwhelmed. There's a lot of information here. Yes. So. And the key is that cross pollination with other data and the subjective presentation of that individual, because as you reported, you feel great. You're doing well. Energy is good. You know, overall things are good. And that's an important piece of data that ties into this because ultimately metabolomics, which I'll show in just a moment, the test, it's a unique and very powerful lens into what's going on in a human system biochemically. Being impacted by all inputs, not simply, you know, your nutritional status or what you're got biome is producing, but your stress, your sleep, and your exercise, all these things are influencing the metabolism. And so it's a, I do believe it's a very powerful tool. It's part of my staple workup for all patients I see now. We always include a theory on panel, along with the other data that I collect on patients, which still includes comprehensive blood tests, body composition and bone density with DEXA arterial screenings, talks panels, possibly gut panels, like we're still looking at a lot of various endpoints. And what I'll say thus far is I've seen a high congruency with what therium is reporting and concluding about that system with the other tests that I'm running, which is help me to build my confidence in this tool and that it is accurately assessing the, these biochemical domains. And then meaningfully applying those, was that look like from a standpoint of self-function, human function? But the interpretation is critical and you know, there's so much knowledge out there, right? Like there's, it's incredible how much and I love it. It's wonderful. Like all the different knowledge around different diagnostics, different aspects of human health, behavioral interventions, molecules, peptides, and now regenerative therapeutics, there's so much information, but actually how you apply that knowledge is where the power is, right? And that application piece is critical and I think especially for consumers who might not have structured education and any kind of health domain, they might be a very educated consumer. They may know more than a lot of doctors and probably do about peptides and region, but at the end of the day, the actual putting it together into a story that makes sense around this human system and then the hierarchy of interventions you would create, that really does take, I believe, clinical experience. AI might get there eventually. It's not there right now, right? At the end of the day, AI can be very helpful, it can give you some guidance, but it's not skilled and nuanced in its interpretation, capabilities. Well, and you had even said that the way that you work with these results has evolved a lot over the last year because when I first look at that little wheel there, I was like, okay, I'm not, this is this can't be good. But the cool, I think what's great is being able to put it into context for people. So orientation to the report, and I think it's awesome when people in our domain, I've been on a lot of my case, like a lot of times when I'm presenting case plays, I've just presented my own data over time, right? Because I learned a lot by just looking at that and sharing and people saying I'm a fellow human being, right? Like I'm not a perfect specimen of biological health. I have impacts of my profession and life and other things and not every habit do I have doubt in perfectly and it's good for people to recognize that because I think sometimes the the bar of people are trying to attain to or expecting not not trying, trying is good, expecting to attain to is unreasonable for a putting too much pressure on themselves, which is adding to the sympathetic dominance, which we'll talk about later. Which will be our next topic. Yeah. So when we're looking at this test, real quick orientation. So obviously we have these various domains that we can meaningfully create some interpretations based on looking at biochemical metabolites, right? And so we have aging, nutrition, inflammation, mitochondria, you know, cardiovascular, which isn't just arterial function. It gets into cardiac contractility and electrophysiology, hormone management, like really phase one and phase two detoxification processes and deliver bone metabolites, neurocognition, skin, toxin. Now do like this because while I'm still looking at a toxin panel, one, I've seen great concremency because later you'll see they actually index to the toxins that are creating the biochemical impact for this measurement. And what I've seen is it matches pretty well with the actual inventory of toxins I have on that particular individual. Now the pink is where you don't want to be. The pink is like this is like impairment dysfunctional pathways, you you probably need to intervene in these particular areas. So there's in what's that? No, there's a couple of areas that need some attention. And specifically aging for the longevity podcast, which is bizarre because, you know, every other metric of aging I get is good. And so this is where understanding that this tool is a predictive tool, this is the this is the canary in the coal mine. Yes. Before before anything really shows up. Yeah, what do you look? Yeah, if you look at most of my other testing results, I'm killing it. Yeah. Like I'm, you know, I'm over a decade younger than my biological, my chronological age. I've got all this great data that I can run around, waving a banner at. If I go to a glycine age tomorrow, I'll be 20 years old, amazing. And yet. Yeah. But this is what is right now by a biochemical level. There's an enormous amount of research. This is heavily based in biomedical sciences, publishing research, right? They've been researching publishing on the metabolism and critical metabolite ratios for decades. We just didn't have the ability to create them interpretations because the data sets too complex. Yeah. And AI is what has, you know, facilitated the fact that we can finally really create more specific interpretations. But yeah, at the time, you're aging pathways, you know, which are multiple pathways. So clean up autophagy, oxidative stress, membrane physiology. They're not doing well. Now, remember the context. She stopped all her basic support. And even if she is 20 from biochicine age, actually she's still 62. Yeah. Almost. Yeah. Sorry. Almost 62. Okay. Another month. Yeah. And so, yeah, this one's, you know, if you're in the yellow, you're in technically what's called the normative range. You'd rather be high normative than low normative since it's okay. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be intervening. But there's usually going to be a subdomain within that area that might be unique where that's what you need attention and what you would typically see is it's going to actually cross match with other subdomains for other areas, meaning we don't really have to use as a individual tool for every one of these subdomains. There's some common tools that are going to work across all of them. That's what I was going to say. Like once you you're working on one thing, it's going to drive. They're going to be interconnected. Yeah. Okay. We know that your NAD NAD age balance was terrible at the time of this test. Right. We know that and we have reasons for that actually. That is going to massively impact aging pathways. DNA repair, mitochondrial function, inflammatory, all of it fixing that alone can have a global effect on the metabolism. Yeah. These are where Natalie is scoring right now. This out here is their predictive score, which is generally pretty accurate if there are no major confounders and people are reasonably compliant with the intervention plans. We'll talk about the intervention plans in just a moment. But you can see that this is actually a pretty big movement over months to be able to go from a 42 out to whatever this total would be substantially higher. Into the high normative and some things optimal tells us that this is a biochemical system that's modifiable. This is not a system that is deeply entrained into dysfunction and probably resistant to change, which is what happens in disease states. We've migrated into disease. The body is done every compensation it can to keep you alive. It's doing a good job of that. And now beginning to get these pathways to correct, you have to bring the sledgehammer, not just the little, well, precise toolkit. Yeah. Which is probably what's happening now, right? Like I'm tapping out my reserves. Yes. Not now. But what I was at the time of this test when I had stopped everything, I was basically depleting my reserves. That's right. Just hasn't shown up yet. This isn't a tablet that bounces back quickly, right? With just the right inputs, just getting some things back and play that were needed. And again, we'll emphasize, not always. I mean, I have patients who come and have multiple chronic diseases and they have terrible endotabellomics reports. And so it can be correlated to disease to some extent. But generally speaking, in healthy people who feel well that don't have diagnoses, we're way upstream of disease. Meaning this could go on potentially for years before you're even seeing it in your blood metrics. Right? Yeah. That's an experiment. I'm not running. Yeah. No reason to run that experiment. Fixerly. And I think the younger you start with accessing information like this, where all you really need is a little bit of fine tuning and modification. And you just keep this metabolism tune to whatever optimal is for you. Then the better opportunity you have to resist disease and stay healthy and feel good. Now also what's realistic for optimal, right? For an aging population. And depending on the context, stress, travel, toxin exposure, etc. And their newer reports will start doing some indexing towards age so that you're not being compared with 20-year-olds. Yeah. So let's talk about that a tiny bit. I want to, the last couple of things I want to touch on on this test. And then I want to move on to our other topics because we don't want this podcast to be all about me. Number one, what do you think the three or four early signals are that we really need to hit attention to? And you pointed to the aging one, which is the DNA dam aging. Is that the DNA repair? No, well, mutational loads DNA repair, but that's not looking great either. And these two walk hand in hand. Yeah. Well, but it's not as bad as the aging. No, but mutational load, aging, inflammation, mitochondria could all be integrated into a kind of common domain. Correct. Yeah. So that's so basically, hack it, go with that. And then the two ones at the bottom. Yeah, we're looking at our liver processing. And this is going to try right back into not only but the glutathione that we talked about. Yeah. And then bone metabolic pathways. Now, the big themes of your report are nutrient depletion and oxidative stress, right, which no, no, like duh, right? Like we weren't using our typical broad based higher dose essential nutrient support. Yeah. And as much as we wish, the food would provide it, you know, good luck there. And especially with biomes that have been altered by our environments and age and stress. So we're not going to go through every one of these in detail. I'm just going to point out a few key points. So under each domain, they're giving you your score, right? Aging is not great at this point. We want to target it. And they have subdomains that affect aging. So cellular paranormal longevity or getting into autotrophaging pathways. And then fatty acid and cell membrane health, which is critical. Like cell membranes, I've probably you've already been beating that drum on this podcast a lot, right? Yeah. Cell membranes, that's like that ground zero of mitochondrial function because mitochondria are dependent upon their membranes. And at baseline, for most people with mitochondrial issues, it's the original insult is an unhealthy biochemical environment with high oxidative stress. But the end result of that are membranes with holes bunched in them. You can no longer maintain mitochondrial voltage in cases like that. And that membrane repair process of getting the right things loaded back in to help manage the oxidative stress and build rebuild those membranes. If you just do it the natural way, you're talking nine months of the process, which mean if you if you've got a syndrome of fatigue, cognitive fatigue, whatever from mitochondrial dysfunction and you've and you've eliminated the cause, whether it's chronic infection, heavy toxicant burden, where you've minimized it at least for stress or sleep deprivation. And now you're in repair phase, you don't expect in three weeks that you're popping back, right? You'll be feeling better, but it's a long game you're playing. Yeah. We're leading the system. Now there are peptides that can accelerate that and make you allow you to play a faster game. But this one's really key. And then we're seeing that, you know, cellular energy production is impaired. And part of that, you can look at your low adenosine level, which is a sign of low ATP turnover, right? So energy flux is reduced. There's a lot of other things that go into adenosine, but that's one of them. But niacinamide, one of our substrates for niacin, I mean, you see it up here, but it really should be up here. Yeah. And then glutathione, right? Which of course, as we age, we're producing less plus it's being overtaxed with all the additional toxicant work it's doing on top of its regular job of managing oxidative stress and other chemical processes. That's very low. So these are pretty, you know, key. And if we it would just kind of go down and we want to again go like once again, do we see fatty acid and lipid balance, right? Which is going to tie into membranes again. And so some of the other nutrients, and maybe if I don't find them, I'll just tell like our nicotinemic nicotinic acid, our other form of niacin was not optimal alko-tocopherol, was not optimal, optimal. There's a vitamin B6 metabolite that was not optimal, alpha-linolac acid, an important fatty acid for mitochondrial membrane structural integrity. That was low. And you get the thing, right? I don't probably have to say a whole lot more about that. The bottom line was your diet wasn't providing adequate levels of essential macromacranutrients just to support normal biochemical function. And that alone is a massive mover with this. Like you could make one argument of, let's just fix nutritional sufficiency and see what happens. Yeah, but you know, we're going to go a little for, I'm going to go a little further than that. I would say 62, not 25. This is a report on 25 year old. I may simply say, let's just fix the nutrient, let's make our new trend of availability and see what happens. This is probably maybe a month after I'd stopped crazy travel, crazy, like disruption. It was, it was, it's, it's just really interesting in eye opening. And what it tells me is those, those big, those breaks of everything are not an option. Yeah. Right. Like I've got enough stress on my system all the time. That's the time to kind of really lean into all the core foundational supplements, because that's when I'm rebuilding. Yeah, you are the rest of travel. The demand pressure that you're putting on your system cognitively, physically is, it's huge. Right? Like you need a, you, your biochemical system isn't being asked to deal with, you know, just sort of a minimal threshold of performance. It's, it's having to maintain high cognitive load, high physical load on top of circadian rhythm, disruption from travel, stress of travel, exposures of travel. So you've got to push in with more robust support for these systems, than somebody who might be in a retirement phase and really has their life centered around rest, recovery and relaxation. Yeah, exactly. And adequate, adequate, whatever. Okay. So, all right. So net net, guys, I think what we wanted to bring to this discussion was, you know, that this tool, and I mean, I recorded a podcast with the guys at Therion last year. The test has come a long way. And I just wanted to provide a snapshot of the, of how it's being used a year out now and how it's evolved. And so, you know, all, all I'm going to take, all of Dr. Vickery's recommendations to heart and I'm back on the program. And I actually have been back on my program for a little while. So I'll probably do a retest in six months and fingers crossed, everything will have bounced back. And I anticipate this the case. And real quickly on the mitochondrial side, what we see are multiple blocks and energy pathways. And then this, this NAD balance is, is not good, which is a course of critical molecule. And so we won't go through the whole digital twining where they actually create your own intervention plan. They don't mean for people to adopt all these interventions. The model is based on adopting, you know, 60% of them, they're very specific. They use a process called digital twining, they clone your metabolism a thousand times. Their AI engine basically looks at all the research based inputs that could be used to shift a metabolism, runs a thousand experiments, picks the best of a thousand for you. So it's very helpful. Anything that's easy, you should do. But in Natalie's case, we would focus on NAD replenishment, starting first with making sure she's got adequate niacin. But then, you know, in her particular case, they're suggesting that nicotinamide riboside at 500 milligrams will be the best preloader for NAD versus a NMN or other approaches. And then, you know, getting back on her glutathione support and optimizing nitric oxide pathways because they were showing impairment on this report and fixing nutrient sufficiency and fatty acids. So her cell membranes can be maintained and then she can maintain. Like, that would be our focus in Natalie's case, right? Which she's already done. She already got back on her protocol. And I don't know if now is a good time to segue into what would be that base level of support somebody might stay on. Even when they're taking breaks from their more intensive regiments or not, it's your show you can. Well, I mean, if you think about it, the things that I should not ever have broken off of. And I know that from a genetic perspective, my nitric oxide production is not, my pathways are not optimized. My glutathione pathways are not optimized. Like, I know this even from my genetic testing days. And so, you know, this was a bit of an experiment and it was a short-term experiment. So the wheels haven't come too far off the bus. But things I won't be taking breaks from glutathione support, NAD support, you know, the omega-3s, the fatty 15, like all the PC oil, like all of the things to address the cell membrane. Your B vitamins, your minerals, all that, and your nitric oxide support. And so, you know, so the list is not that short, guys. Like, I mean, they're still, it's interesting, right? I think probably, and even spurmiting is something. Yeah, your levels were not up to mold spurmiting, yeah. Exactly. And so, and spurmiting night kind of taken a break from. So it's just really, this was a really valuable experiment for me. And I'm hoping that people can learn from me without doing it themselves, necessarily. And that is to understand the value of supplementation, like smart supplementation. In the sense that we often, we will need it. And my stack might be different than the next person's stack. But there's that, that, that not of support that my body just needs to deal. And everybody's body actually essential macro and micronutrients. So when I say macro nutrients, I'm talking about essential fatty acids and what protein or essential amino acids. At the dosing that's really required to fill our nutritional gaps, based partly on gut biomes shifts that are affecting what's actually getting there, right? So we are having to use heavier doses than we'd like, because of some other aspects. But the essential nutrient piece, and then depending on age and health, the antioxidant support, I mean, nitric oxide pathways and glutathion, making sure you're not beginning to drop off in that glutathionability. Those are just critical, foundational, most people are going to benefit from staying on at least that kind of core regimen. And then there might be other things their human system uniquely needs on a normal basis. So the last thing on Therium that I forgot we wanted to talk about, and that is that right now, my results are being compared to the entire cohort of people. It's not being spread out across age. And I'm actually grateful for that, because they are going to be moving into a world where my 60 something year old female self will be compared to a more age appropriate group. Let's say women 55 to 75, for example, I don't know where their breaks are going to be. And in that cohort, I may have performed way better. That's right. I'm a comparative perspective. Where what I'm being compared to now is like the full spectrum of ages. So there's a lot of young people in there dragging down that number. I'm dragging down your number. Well dragging my number down and pulling up the numbers. So, but this is the thing, right? I'm actually grateful that I'm getting this because my goal is to perform like a younger person. My goal is not to perform better than other people in my age group. That's right. Right? And so it'll be interesting to say, it would be interesting to see if when they bring out the new model where they're sequestering you into your proper age group and gender, how those numbers would have looked different if it could compare to my. Yeah. And as we discussed in our pre-meeting, so I've been adopted these reports after you introduced me to the company. Thank you. Yeah, that's the B-Paul and I'm bringing back a lot. That's right. And you know me, I'm constantly vetting diagnostic tools. And there are a lot of great tools out there, many of which add marginal value to what we're doing. It's overkill. It's more information that's needed or it's not information that's really clinically validated yet. And so I'm very selective about what tests am I going to bring into the model? And this one's become a cornerstone test along with other tests. I don't look at it as a solo test. You need more context to interpret your results. But the test is continually a bot. They're continually improving your technology. Their machine learning is rapidly evolving. You know, it's not far down the road that will have not only the metabolism, but the proteome and the transcriptome and full-genome sequencing. And we'll put B playing a whole new ball game in precision medicine with that. Because what we're looking at here are things I used to have to intuit, make educated guesses that I believe there's probably a membrane problem based on a fatty acid balance test that I had some oxidative stress numbers. I believe that and how that patients reporting their energy and performance. So we're going to start by working on cell membranes and doing these other things. Now I can actually know, right? This is where the problems are. And that helps me a lot when it comes to this huge toolbox of therapeutics, behavioral interventions, technologies, and peptides to really dial it into what's really needed in this human system. And what's not. And because there as we also know, as we as you run all these amazing podcasts with brilliant researchers, you've had new molecules, good molecules that many people could benefit from. If you just keep stacking one after the other and other into your protocol, one you're spending a lot of money, there's a lot of time and effort. You're probably creating stress response to some extent, feeling like you know, you got to manage all this, which is working against your system. And you might be creating biochemical confusion for your body. Many times I find people who come in to see me and who have big stacks of peptides that they're essentially just as an example, they're actually priming AMPK and MTOR at the same time, right? They're not, it's like a real common one. And so you've got to understand the systems and how they work in balance and where you're trying to take the body over a given phase. And this test has helped me a lot, but I don't look at it exclusively. I think their intervention plans are great, but they would tell you, they would tell you that they don't have peptides on these intervention lists. Peptides, like in certain areas, where as he certain domains, for instance, where we have a cell membrane problem, or a mitochondrial membrane problem. And yeah, we've got to make sure the phospholipids and maybe plasma allegins and the essential fatty acids and all of these are made available to the cell so it can do the repair. But then we can bring in a peptide like SS31, which stabilizes cardio life and accelerate that membrane repair. Meanwhile, if you're not having an issue with mitochondrial membrane performance and you're trying SS31, because everybody tells you improves your energy, maybe you felt an energy boost, but that was probably psychosomatic, because it's actually not doing much for you. And that would be the worst day. It's definitely the point. Yeah, and so it's great for us to be able. And what's in any up happening though is that people who are wanting to use every therapeutic, because they all sound so awesome, are a little disappointed because they wanted more. And I'm like, no, we're going to be doing less. We're actually we're pulling back. Yeah, or people who jump into MOTC before having done before having done the membrane work. That's right. Or not doing the membrane work. Yeah, and this is like reaching to the choir, but I see it all the time because peptides become popular and they have for a good reason. And people are jumping to them based on reading about them and yet have not done any of this foundational work that would actually set their biological system up to respond optimally to that peptide. And so it's like, you can't skip these foundations, which is what you did temporarily to take a well-deserved break. But you know, I mean, the good news is all my, you know, my CAMT score was zero. So I got like no plaque in my carotid, I've no no thickening of the carotid arteries. Like my brain function score was amazing. Like when I did this blood work right around the time that I did this, ran this test, it was also accompanied by lots of other functional testing. Yeah, your VRVO2 max looked good. Yeah, a lot of those other, you did the hand grip strength and core strength and all those assessments look good for you. Yeah, so it's, but this is making sure we, we short up and we still, yeah, this is this is deeper, more granular work, but I think very necessary work if you want the results of living as long as you can and as healthy as a body condition. Yeah, I'm representing. So now let's let's let's leave the test behind and let's move into something into another topic that I that underpins all of this, right? And this is this whole mindset toxicity, like the sympathetic state. These are the, these are the foundations under the foundations, if you will. And I think that this is one of the, it's a big theme that's coming up in your work is what you're seeing in terms of what we call sympathetic dominance, which we could call chronic stress or being in fight or flight. And I'd love to invite you to kind of talk about what you're seeing and how is, how in your mind is this affecting all this metapot metabolic data or frankly, even just people's ability to stay healthy or reclaim their health massively. And if it's not being addressed, I'm not saying that there's no benefit. I mean, of course, still maintaining nutrients and antioxidants and all these things are always going to be helpful. But if you're not working on rebalancing your autonomic nervous system, you're still ultimately going to be going backwards. I mean, there is nothing that has a greater impact on pace of aging, epigenetic aging and chronic sympathetic dominance also has direct impacts on gut integrity. It'll create hyperpermeability independent of like toxins and molecules doing that. It has a direct impact on the actual health and diversity of the gut biome. And then it has a direct impact on central nervous system inflammatory pathways and oxidative stress, which have a direct impact on your transmitter synthesis and neurotransmitter balance. This is so critical. I begin recognizing this, you know, like a decade ago, I think when I ran my own first epigenic age test, who knows how accurate they were then? I was 45. The result was that of a 63 year old. It was purely a tale, Marilyn. Yeah. And it caught my eye because at 45, I had recovered from the first 12 years of starting a medical clinic and having three kids. I had begun to get back into good fitness and my sleep was good. And although I would have self-reported my stress as low because I felt motivated and excited about the work I was doing, the truth was that it was a ridiculous amount of demand pressure. I was putting on my system running my business, seeing massive loads of patients, doing everything I was doing. And when I did the deep dive into the impacts on epigenic age, it was clear that stress was the one thing that I wasn't sensing it. I thought, you know, I'm doing great because I use positive psychology to re-translate my life into this is all awesome, which is a healthy thing to do. But and so I had tuned out the fact that my body was living in threat state physiology all the time. That's what drove me to heart rate variability in the early days of heart rate variability. And my heart rate variability was deceptively solid. But then if you got into the abs that break it down into frequency inputs, I was pinned against the far side of sympathetic dominance. And I tried all the hacks because I'm like, man, I got to keep doing what I'm doing and none of it budgeted. It didn't budget. It just was stuck there. And so that was where I began to rebalance how I was going to approach my professional career in a way that gave me more rest recovery and just time back into woods and things like that. And I did. And it took years and years, but eventually my autonomic nervous system did we balance. Now we can do it faster with some technologies that have come to the market. But at the end of the day, it took a long time. Interestingly enough, seven years later, when I repeated epigenetic age with DNA methylation and had taken big stacks of bioregiotrary peptides and rebalance my autonomic nervous system, my epigenetic age came back as a 45 year old when I was 52. There you go. Yeah. That was a 20 to the extent this was accurate, right? Which we don't know. That was a 21 year swing and epigenetic age over a stretch where I aged seven years. And I do think bioregiotrary peptides played a big role in that. But anyway, I would have been to do an immaterial my own patients about their stress and just observing them. And I began to realize that even like the non-stress, non-depressed, hyperformer, super-ooper athlete, corporate, you know, these people, their systems were tanking because of stress. And I knew it. But it was like, what was the answer? The answer was a lot of spiritual practices, rebalancing, how you reset your environment, the expectations you place upon yourself. And that's just not easy for people. And some for some people, it's not even optional. The demands of their life are such that they can't really put boundaries around it at that particular time. But that may be not at that time, but they need to begin to forecast when they could. And so this is like critical. And for instance, I have one of these uberspestimate guys who incredibly athletic, incredibly fit does everything. And when I first met him, his data wasn't looking great because he wasn't taking care of the basics. And he was putting to huge demand pressure. But then once we got him on the foundational stuff, it all cleaned up. It was beautiful. His metabolomic data was near optimal. And he was in his early 50s. And then in six months later is the tabulum had all contracted down other than toxicant, which was better because we had been working on that. But everything else was contracted down. And the one variable that had changed for him was he was going through a very hostile divorce. I knew it. And he was working on him. And like, so we got down to all these interventions. And I'm like, bottom line is that this is stress. Stress has shifted your entire metabolism. It's that powerful. It can do that to you. And so it is absolutely critical that you're doing the right inventory on it. And you can't if you're a person who's really invested in mindset, you can't necessarily trust your own interpretations about the impact of stress. Heart rate variability is a very helpful metric for this. I'm talking about like the heart math tool stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then being able to take heart rate variability and find out what are those frequency inputs? Because mine was actually deceptively high for somebody who had such high sympathetic dominance in terms of the frequency inputs. And so being able to understand that and then being able to track that over time and seeing if it's beginning to shift. And people will use all kinds of interventions, molecules, hoping to shift HRV. Rarely do I see that work. What I do see work is when they begin to actually push in. Again, speaking about this in a more vague way, spiritual practices that allow them to begin to operate more out of the sense of safety rather than threat and vigilance. Everyone is chasing collagen creams. But here's the real plot twist. Your skin cannot make collagen if your cells stop sending the signal. As we age, that communication line gets fuzzy. And your cells get tired and repair slows. Blue peptide spray from young goose brings the message back loud and clear with NAD plus apex to refuel energy, methylene blue to recharge your mitochondria and GHKCU to tell your skin, hey, start making that collagen again. It's longevity science, not cosmetic hype, working at the cellular level instead of just layering on top. So keep your skin talking. Visit younggoose.com, use code NAT 10 to get started. Or if you're already a young goose customer, you can use code 5 NAT to still save. So what you're saying, if I'm hearing you properly is there's no supplement, there's no tech, there's nothing that's going to really be able to push that lever for you if it's a lever that's a factor for you, which it may or may not be. But nothing is going to move that lever until you've done that inner work. That's right. And that may or may not, now do you think that doing the inner work can offset if your life doesn't change? Like you still have a crazy life, you're still running on all cylinders. Is there a threshold of things that still need to be met for that inner work to translate into better outcomes? It's a great question. And briefly, I do want to acknowledge technologies can be helpful for this. For sure. They could possibly slow the progression, they might help bring you back a little code, but they can't fix it. That's internal. I do think some of the new vagal nerve stimulators, the Katrina will disagree with me on this, but I've seen results with patients using some of the new devices that have some published data where over a eight or 12 week period we're seeing heart rate variability come up and sleep scores agree with that being the only intervention. So I do think technology, brain mapping, a neurofeedback, and heart math, all these things can absolutely be helpful and they can at least teach you how to recognize when your nervous system has been triggered and because you'll feel it when you go out of coherence, right? If you've learned what coherence feels like, you'll know the feeling I've gone out and something, until I heart math, you can learn how to quickly get yourself back to at least coherence. So that's going to at least mitigate to some extent the negative impacts of this, but that internal state really has a lot to do with interpretation around threat or safety. Right. And right now the vast majority of inputs coming into us via social media, via news, pilot the political environment, other people who have been trained by these systems is generally going to provoke us into threat state. Right. The things are not okay. You are not okay. And yeah, there are real problems in the world and there's real volatility and for some individuals, they may be dealing with a medical challenge, financial challenge or a loved one that's sick. Those are those, the we're all going to encounter these things. But when you multiply on top of that, everything else, right, you you feel completely out of control, even if you don't necessarily, you really, your, your nervous system knows there's nothing I can do about a lot of this. We go out of control and it's how we perceive stress that plays a big role, whether it's a negative or non-negative, that in a lack, in a lack of agency over it being disempowered is a major contributor to this issue. And so how you begin to recognize that at the end of the day, it's about am I threatened or am I safe? Right. And you may be in certain domains feeling a little threatened right now, could be financial, it could be health, it could be a loved one. But then there are a lot of other domains where you're totally safe. And for most of us, probably listening to this podcast, in general, we are safe, right? We the core drivers of ancestral stress are just not an issue for us. We probably have a stable living environment with, you know, at the ability to mitigate extreme temperatures and the ability of food and water. And if we live in a relatively safe place, aren't necessarily, there's a low physical likelihood that we're going to have violence or something like that happen to us, right? So all of those things, so like I'm alive, I've got a body that's working for me. Hopefully I have some degree of family or social support, I have a system. Connectivity is critical, right? Human connectivity, social, social isolation, huge player in this. I'm connected to other people. I have nurturing relationships, you know, at the end of the day, anything could happen this day. But in general, I'm safe. And I do have agency because today I have a living human body that has amazing capacity and built into it. I have an ability to go out and begin to engage in life in a way that can produce a different, you know, set of circumstances for me eventually. And so really in training to that and beginning to because what's happening is the times where we should just be at ease and non-digilant, you know, at home safe, tucked away after dinner with family on a Sunday, on a date off, on a hike in the woods, we're not. We're actually in threat state. And so we're not getting yet. And then that on an emergency system is in train, meaning it becomes a habit. It's just where it lives. It's not like every day you wake up with a fresh new start and a nervous system that's just ready for what's going to happen today. You are now waking up already under a sense of threat. And everything you're doing is under a sense of threat, whether you're perceiving it as threat or not, that's what's going on. And threat state physiology is unique and distinct from safe state physiology. And so the internal work and the environmental work, the type of sound environment, the lighting environment, the social environment, who you connect with, that's going to be critical for being able to cultivate this calming, I'm okay, everything is all right, you know, safety. And if you're not working towards that, then you're going to be entrained into a threat state all the time, just based on our society and the way things go and the pressures of life. And no matter all the peptides and molecules you want to use, you're going to age and accelerate it right and you're going to end up having challenges. Right. So the take away from this section is finding a way to find that inner balance. And there might be some tech that can help you. The heart math, I have, it's funny, you know, I haven't even done a podcast with them yet. And I probably mentioned them more often than anything else on this podcast. The heart math tool is wildly easy to use. It's not very expensive. And it trains you to train yourself to get out of a sympathetic state, so that eventually you're just better at doing that for yourself. But the big takeaway here is investing in the skill and getting rid of the practices that are keeping you in that sympathetic state. And maybe even investing in some technology would be one of the most worthwhile foundational things you can do for your health and pace of aging. Yeah, and sleep obviously. Obviously. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, the, the, yeah, you summed it up nicely. Okay, because I want to move on. I want to move on to toxicity and detox. So one of the things when we were talking about earlier that you talked about quite dramatically, because everybody's talking about mold and definitely mold is a big deal. A lot of people talk about lime, but you've seen a dramatic increase in a particular toxicant that left you actually really surprised. And you were talking about heavy metals. Yeah, heavy metals. And so do you think, like, do you think that it's that there's more exposure? Do you think that our detox pathways are more impaired? Like, what do you think? Because you were yourself. You were like, I'm shocked. Like, I am seeing numbers I've never seen before. So, and I'm seeing heavy metals I've never seen before. That's what I do. And these are actual metals. Yeah, these are, these are reports that are accurate. This is what was in your system that you were excreting. And that's only showing you what was excreted at a given time. It's not showing you what all is stored. And there can be acute exposures. If you go for an MRI with gadolinium, you're going to have had gadolinium for a period of time until you clear it. Some people don't detox it that well. And so they probably need to be on a focused detox at that time. But nonetheless, a lot of these are just kind of chronic. And, you know, about five, six years ago, when I began running these talks panels, because I realized that we're going to have to dig deeper, because there's, you know, at first, I was also distrustful of the data, because it was just already bad, right? We've talked about the glyphosate levels on everybody off the chart. That's gotten actually better. I think that might be a lot of awareness and people going to more organic. But a lot of other organic phosphates, pesticides, herbicides are still there. Thalates, paraben, paraben, plasticizers. I don't think I've seen anybody with optimal BPA. It's like, I don't know how you're going to make it. You can't get away from it. You can't get away from it. And it has real biological impacts. But, you know, again, your biological system is robust and resilient and really well-designed. And it can handle some negative inputs, as long as it's not being overwhelmed by them. And it has what it needs to function well. So I don't get all worked up if I see a high level of BPA on my talks panel, which I see every time. As long as others are being managed and other systems, you know, systems, I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to believe a plasticizer is going to determine my destiny, right? I just not. Look, let's talk about stress, right? Talk about what feeling safe. Like if you're feeling attacked from the inside, you know, it's pretty hard to do this any kind of spiritual work that's going to offset that. But you just said something really important that I just want to highlight for the audience, which is coming back to trusting your body. And what we're going to try to do here and what this conversation, this part of the conversation on heavy metals and toxins is going to focus on is what can we, can we diminish the load so that the body can go back to dealing with what it can deal with? Mm-hmm. Right? So enormous part of the work I'm doing with people, even sick people who come in is really focused on the psychological aspects of restoring confidence in their own body. Their body's self-healing, self-regenerating capacity given that it has the right information to work with to do so. And I'm convinced I've seen, I've seen terrible diseases that we didn't think there was any way to reverse greatly improved. Right? I've seen health restoration and people you didn't think it's just been too long, they're too sick, but they bought in and they were willing to do it. And yeah, we use big intensive protocols and it was a long game, two, three, four years. But it's remarkable the case studies that we can present. But nonetheless, what I started seeing, you know, on those talks report to Rachel, I was already disturbed by, we started working on those things. But I would didn't see many heavy metals. Occasionally, there was the mercury in people who were eating a lot of sushi or seafood or also had mercury fillings. And occasionally, there were trace amounts of sometimes lead. And if you know, a little bit of arsenic, that's heavily contaminated, the food supply. Now the person I saw just before we did this podcast, we've got sesame, sesame, trillium, cadmium, titanium, lead, arsenic, mercury, gadolinium and she did not get in it. All of these heavy metals. And now this is, I want to be clear to the audience, this is just my observations in a clinic, right? This isn't a human study, this isn't population level data, but this is hundreds of people that I've assessed over a continuity of time, right? And what I've seen is a major increase in the quantity and the number of different variants of heavy metals on these talks reports, which I know are having biological impact. Your own talks section of your therium, your microtoxins look pretty good. Just so- Like it was actually not bad. Yeah, actually most of it looked pretty good. There were industrial chemicals, which were very hard to avoid. And there was BPA or pesticides, and there was heavy metals, right? Yeah, and so the most common sources for the heavy metals are going to be the same as many of the other toxicants, food and water. Clear. I mean, that's where we're probably getting most of these. We know dark chocolate was implicated with cadmium recently. Not if you're buying it from Katrina. Yeah, right. So, right. Yeah, and so, it's, I don't know whether, to your one of your questions around why, I've thought about this a lot. I do think it's both. I think it's a depletion of internal resiliency and its ability to deal with toxicant burdens. But I also think there's probably been a tipping point we crossed with soil quality, groundwater quality, and just food manufacturing where we, and seafood, and also ocean pollution, where we just, we just crossed over. And even if you're being very cautious with the foods that you purchased trying to keep them clean, you're probably still getting some heavy metal contamination in there. Yeah, so what do people do about it? How are you helping people support? How are you supporting people in this? Well, obviously, we proactively support endogenous detox systems and hopefully have them working the way they should be working. And then we, and they got biomeplace world in this. Got biome as part of our detox, especially micro toxins. And so, working on the gut and the nutrient piece, all of that. And then we do have dedicated detox protocols. I typically use the cell core products because they work. I mean, that they really do. And we can have our heavy metal and biotox, and biotox, and vinyr, and drainage activators. But then on the other side, we got to turn the faucet off. We don't turn the faucet off, where yeah, we're not accomplishing anything. I ask all my patients if feasible to get home, whole house, water filtration, a good system, right? Yeah. That makes a good, that makes a major difference. And a lot of this heavy metal contamination is now water, right? Municipal water. And many of, like, sink filters and things like that that I would be a fan of if that's all you have aren't necessarily going to clear all that. So, and then when you shower and skin is permeable, right? So, like being able to bathe, brush your teeth, and cook with, and then drink water this been heavily filtered, you know, and then you can argue for the restructuralization, mineralization. Yeah, I agree with all that. But nonetheless, clear the poisons first. So, I ask them to do that. And then when it comes to the food, I don't want people to get weird about food and be afraid to eat, right? I don't. Because that's going to be play right back into the stress thing, which arguably might have more bad impact than the toxin thing, right? So, I'm like, when your friends all want you to meet at the Mexican restaurant, then go and eat, maybe use a little extra glutathione if you're nervous or take a binder, right? That's fine. I do that. If I eat sushi, I take a heavy metal binder every time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's not hard to do, and I'm not stressed about it. But at the same time, recognizing that you're playing a percentage game. I think we talked about this yesterday. And the percentage you get to play is dependent on your health, right? Your fragility or your, and your resiliency. If you've got a, you know, an anti-fragile, highly resilient system that you've been building up and your metabolism is functioning well, then you probably can play a 20% game where 20% of the time, you're just not going to think much about it. But the 80% and that's mostly going to be your home environment, the snack foods you have, the foods in your cupboard, the foods in your refrigerator, you have found reputable brands that have minimized toxin, you know, and it's going to make a big difference. And then when you're eating out, you can certainly, if it's, you got good restaurants that do farm the table from local organic farmers, sure, choose those. That's great. But yeah, you got to do the food thing. And if you're a more fragile person that is in a phase where you're trying to either reverse disease or your tip at the tipping point of disease, you might need to play a 95% game or even a 100% game for a season. For a period of time. Yeah. So you build back up that resiliency in your system. And then of course, there's air. And I think my brain knows this. Now, the air pollutants are not where we're getting the heavy metals. But nonetheless, having the proper, I use both primary and secondary air filtration. I was going to say, wouldn't air in a major city give you heavy metal? You know, it's a great question. And maybe it does. I think that car exhaust does continue. Yeah, you know, you're you're right. And if you were to get those, it's a question of in the pulmonary tree. I don't know the answer to the question, but it's a great question. I'm going to get it because I'm going to go find out. Well, I've got two two scrubbers and I've got two of the Jasper scrubbers at my house. And it's, you know, it's almost like every time they have a sale, I'm going to add another one for another room kind of. Yeah. I have it running and multiple. I try to have my whole area. And when I, not that I'm seeing the micro particles, but when I change those filters every six months, just the more heavy particular matter, it has caught that my high gun age fax system with built-in air purification has not been able to capture tells me, I'm glad I'm doing this. Yeah. Because it's not subtle when I pull that filter out of there and replace it. It looks very different than the new one. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah. And so, you know, the air quality. And I do think you're probably right when I look and read because that with one of the things with the talks panel, I run, they always have the most latest research. What are the likely sources of exposure? What are the health impacts of these heavy metals? And generally it's air and water. I mean, sorry, usually it's water and food and then exposures and manufacturing except, you know, things like that. And I haven't seen air coming up. But it's I'm really curious about this now, whether air is actually. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely like, if you're on a plane and so we've, you know, I spend too much time on planes and somebody just handed me a supplement stack to take when you're on the plane. Uh-huh. And it's a specific binder and the company, it's a new company called Detox You. The letter You. And he's got an industrial binder complex and another one. And because when we're on planes, the exhaust from the plane, the recycled air, the materials in the plane, there's there. And it's, you know, and this is not to freak people out or to make them crazy. These are relatively easy interventions, right? You're not going to stop flying. You got to get from point A to point B. Okay, so if I need to fly, then I will do this. I will drink my molecular hydrogen. I will, you know, I'll do the things I've got my travel stack that hopefully is helping to mitigate. It's not going to do it all. But it is going to. Yeah. We're about lowering the volume here. Just so that's it. That's it. Just give your body a little better playing field to what would. Yeah. As all and you'll be fine because I do believe human capacities are amazing and we're not even scratching the surface of what really is built into our system from a capacity standpoint into our DNA. Our level of robustness, resilience, cognitive capabilities, physical capabilities. And that's really, it's not really the longevity, which is the title. That's that that's the, the, the journey we're on is pushing in and wanting to know. We don't want to miss out on these capacities in our life. And we're willing to do these things so that we have that opportunity regardless of whether we're in our late 50s or early 60s or, you know, even at a younger age. And so, you know, I really want people to feel confident that their bodies can be healthy, but I can promise you there are, you know, there are things going on environmentally that include stress impacts, but also toxin exposures and lack of nutrients available in a lot of the food you're eating that are impacting your ability to access those capacities and potentially contributing to deficits in capacities and that there are things that your unique human system needs programmed into it if you want to age well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this. So you've said that nutrient sufficiency is foundational in metabolomic in metabolomic terms. What does nutrient depletion look like? And I think we saw part of that in my metabolomic results. Yes. The creation of glutathione showing up. So maybe you want to touch on those points quickly. And then and then I'm curious if you're seeing particular nutrients showing up over and over. Okay. Yeah. It's a great question. Yeah. And so from the standpoint of nutrient sufficiency, and we're talking about essential nutrients, I have also believed polyphenols, important phytonutrients, I play, I think these are all important, but we're talking about the staple of essential molecules that we know our biochemistry is absolutely dependent upon. So that includes vitamins, minerals, and essential macro nutrients, which often get missed in the conversation, which will include your essential fatty acids, which also include omega-6 fatty acids. And now with the seed oil craze, which I'm a fan of, I've gone from a problem of seeing people with too high of linoleic acid over and ever in their cell membranes to now people with too loathe of linoleic acid. Oh, you're correct? No, I'm not. And we're adding and it's creating problems for them. So linoleic acid, you guys is omega-6? Yes. And it's an essential fatty acid. And it's like without it. Yes. Right. And so, you know, for those folks who are absolutely mitigating exposures to, you know, other than omega-3, but polyinsaturated fats, seed oils, you may actually need more linoleic acid. And so where would be a good place to get it? Because we know the processed seed oils from processed foods. Those are not going to be your friend ever. Never, never, never. Yeah. But so organic nuts and seeds. And then things like flax oil or organic sesame oil or some of the, you know, pine nut oil is actually really great. Interesting. Yeah. And so the some of the organic seed oils that are not vegetable corn, savvlar or sunflower, all corn and all that. And then nuts and seeds. And then I have a big fan because like many people, what I see is low alpha linoleic acid, which you had, which honestly, we, I used to put in a category of relatively inert biologically, but an important substrate to build DHA, DPA and EPA out of just not efficient way to get there. Now we have a lot of really good research data showing that mitochondrial membrane structural integrity, alpha linoleic acid is playing a very important role in that. And so for individuals who can use more linoleic acid and certainly more alpha, I'll have them using organic ground flax seed and organic ground chia seed, adding it to their smoothies or yogurt, just making sure it's fresh. If it's old, it's yeah. And for those who don't want to do that, and this is what I personally do, and my levels looked really good on myself some of the brain test, I use an organic flax oil, and I just take a big swig of it every day. And so, and that means I'm getting more linoleic acid, but that's okay because I actually need that. When linoleic acid is regularly used by the mitochondrial, it's a substrate for energy. It's a good energy source. The problem was when it's excessive and it's getting built and then it's overpopulating the cell membrane. Because then to the day, what the body is going to do with cell membranes, it's got to build and take membranes, has to, has no option. So it's only it's going to build a amount of whatever it has available. And so if you have low availability of DHA and EPA, then that's going to create a void in that, you know, what and so what what it's going to fill it up with is what it has, what it can always produce itself is saturated fat. So if it has to, it'll plug that up with saturated fat, which I commonly see high saturated fat indexes on patients with deficiencies in other essential fatty acids, which creates rigid membranes. That affects membrane fluidity, which in the brain has a direct impact on synaptic function. So that's critically important membrane fluidity and polyensate rate fats are maintained that. But if your diet is higher in linoleic acid, then you're going to overpopulate those membranes with linoleic acid and now you're tilted into production of inflammatory acostomalids rather than tamping down inflammation. I'm sure you've talked about that plenty of times. But on the Metabolomics report, so these essential macro-micronutrients you're looking at it two ways. Sometimes you're actually measuring it like alphatocopherol and fatty acids and niacinamide and nicotinic acid and others and peroxidine. But then you're looking at metabolites of this nutrients. Are they being utilized or are they being utilized in the right pathways? And you're also looking at nutrient linked metabolism. In some fat cases, people have the nutrients, but the linkage is broken. And so the chemical reactions are still not taking place. And that's actually fixed through different interventions and then just taking more nutrients. And so that's where thearium really shines, right? Because your blood work just shows you the thing. Yeah. What thearium is looking at, it's looking at, and this is how your body works, guys. And I know many of you know this. It's a series of chemical reactions in pathways from step one to step two to step three to step four. And what thearium is looking at is saying, well, if you have the material for step one and step two, but you're never getting to step four, what is it along that chain that's broken? That's exactly right. And that's the magic in fixing it. Because it's giving us the intervention that we work based on research. Because that's not something I can into it. Right. And exactly because the instinct without that clarity, people might take more of the nutrients. Yeah. But never just have a backup of nutrient without ever getting to creating log jams and other pathways and creating problems. Yeah. So I mean, that's the real, I think that's where that's the value of a metabolomics test that and so many so few clinicians know about it still. It's still in its, it's in its infancy. Yeah, the evolution. They're evolving those reports in a way where it'll be more clinician friendly and more consumer friendly and more directly applicable. And that's an active work in process. And they're going to do a great job of it. Yeah. It's really tough. Even for me, I had a big learning curve, right? To integrate this. And I had to trust it because I have to trust their AI. And so I had to like really do a lot of runs with people, patients I trust who let me experiment on them and know sometimes we're going to mistarget a little bit and then have it with the comparative data, right? Not at the solo. Like I had to be able to look at it with a talks report with an intercellular nutrient report with a pro drum report because it was interesting because every time Therium showed a block in a beta oxidation of fatty acids, I would actually see that on a pro drum report as well. That there was a fatty acid elongation issue. And so that congruency really helped out of my trust. But to the other point of your question, like what are the commonalities that I've seen now for well before I had metabolomics tests that prompted me to like really push in on this whole higher dose, broad-based essential nutrient for a person who's not been supplementing, right? Eating a normal diet, I'm not going to call it a standard American diet, just a normal diet where we're healthy. Almost 100% of the time we're going to see decision Cs in essential fatty acids. Almost 100% of the time, right? And that's critical because that's cell membranes and that's where it all starts. Phospholipids are not technically an essential fatty acid. Everybody builds them. But I do typically see deficiencies in phosphatidyl coaling. Yeah. And sometimes also phosphatidyl ethanolamine, but not as common. And then the B vitamins, right? I knew that it was common in our population to have suboptimal B12, suboptimal folate, and you know, if you had MTH, you'd have come in anyway with that. But when I began seeing the low levels of niacinthhymen, riboflavin, acythinic acid, like it was across the board, it was over. Now what I wouldn't see necessarily, sometimes I did, was outright deficiency, meaning you're going to get sick and have a medical problem if this isn't fixed. But the problem was that intercellularly, you had the bare minimum, right? And so you could sustain a baseline level by a chemical function that would sustain life, but the demand pressure you wanted to put on your system, forget about it. Because then most nutrients are consumed in biochemical reactions. Not always. Sometimes they can be recycled, but most of the time they're consumed. So once they've been utilized, they've been utilized. And if you're not replenishing and maintaining higher intercellular reserve, then there's only so much biochemical demand pressure your system can sustain. Period at the end of the day. And you know, there are a lot of other dynamics here, like for magnetic frequencies and energetics and things that we could get into that are also impacting these systems. But we're focusing on the biochemistry right now. So the bead vitamins, magnesium, that's no surprise to anybody because they've impopulation health studies on that one. Population health studies have consistently shown depleted magnesium, depleted riboflavin, and depleted niacin in our population. And niacin's the basis of NAD. That's your first level of solving your NAD problem is making sure you have what it's built out of in the first place. And then I would commonly see deficiencies in zinc and slinium as two minerals. Now occasionally I would see copper waspitition or a different mineral waspitition. But the big clusters were the essential fatty acids, the phosphatil co-lean, vitamin D of course. And then the the bead vitamins and a few key minerals. Now what I also started seeing in the last few years that I didn't used to see is co-cuting depletion as well. Interesting. Which I think is I could be wrong, but I think it's a oxidative stress, mitochondrial oxidative stress problem. Well because it's massive piece of the puzzle in the antioxidant chain. Yes. So I used to, for most people like co-cuting levels would come in okay. I'm talking about not just in the blood, like an intracellular. And now it's half the time we've got, we're starting with low co-cuting, even in healthy people who've come to see me. Interesting. Have you have you messed around with mitochondal queenol yet or not yet? I haven't, I have recommended it for a few people that like where we really like they're they're need for ubiquinol them out of country. It was like critical. And so I did go there, but okay based on their research and their claims. But otherwise not it's you know these things all add up and cost right. And what I've seen is generally with good quality ubiquinol. And there's ubiquinol and ubiquinol right. One is reduced, ubiquinol is reduced. It's an electron donor, one is oxidized ubiquinol, ubiquinol is an electron receiver. If you're younger and healthier, ubiquinol is probably the thing that you would use. And if you're older or sicker, ubiquinol, you actually need that electron donation. Metabolomics will actually tell you which form you want to use for what they're detecting. But generally a good quality ubiquinol or ubiquinol has fit and follow studies have suggested that it fix the problem. Nice. So once we've addressed those nutritional foundations, what do people feel different? Yeah. Yeah, that was the big thing is that it was like a fill like that one was great because you know like we talked about earlier fixing metacondromybranes maybe a nine-month process. The just repeating nutrients typically within two to three weeks people would say I feel better. My energy is better. Yeah, I think. And so did you create something for nutrient replacement? I did. I did. Yeah, because I used it or yeah, it's all my patients use it because you know because originally I had you know what I had was the phospholipid complex, the fat soluble complex, the essential fatty acids, maybe official oil or some other source. Then I had your full spec from B complex because the B vitamin load and about multivitamin wasn't covering and I couldn't find one that did. Yeah, the noticing that we needed. Then I had the course just the adequate dosing of mineral complex. Then we got full-vict and humic right? Yeah, that's critical. And so I had it was working. This was years ago. It's working. People are taking eight different products, 15 capsules a day and in some solution. But it's working and they don't they're not complaining even though it's cumbersome. And I just had it in my mind that if we could somehow create a unification of those and to common formulaes that that would make everybody's life easier and cheaper. And I finally found a company in Oregon that I could formulate that with. And so we have our essential nutrients is the B vitamins, the patented form of chiaja. So it has the full-vict and humic already intermingled in at the dose that was studied for the patent along with the mineral complex and carotenoids. And then our essential fats has phosphatol curling, phosphatolacering, a thousand milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids ratio to DHAA slightly higher than MPA, AEDNK and ubiquinone coq10. So yeah, well, basically. My children became much happier because they bought in in their teenage years because when they started using the nutrient support, they felt better. And they were like, we know we they went off to college with their big baskets. But when I created my formulations and replaced those eight products with two, they were pretty happy about that. Yeah, nothing wrong with that. All right, so there's an explosion of genetic and metabolomic tests. Like there's a new one every day. You know, I threw two at you before we started recording, but you're like, I haven't seen that yet. What have you learned in the past year about all these new tests that are coming up? Like what should and should not be used for longevity? Do you have any thoughts on that? How do people, how do people look at them critically? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of options and everybody is going to make claims and possibly have some data to support those claims probably. At the end of the day with the more complex like epigenetics, we start looking, I mean, genetics is genetics, right? And people are going to have various algorithms or how many polymorphisms they look at to evaluate a pathway. But for the most part, I feel like the the tests that have been available for some time in the genetic space that would look at say detox pathways, methylation, glutathione synthesis pathways, and I think those are still pretty good, right? Like in terms of information. Yeah, but when it comes to the metabolomics, so I you know, Genova is a great company. I used to use their metabolomics testing. I'm not I still think it's a good product. It doesn't have the same number of metabolites, nor do I think the algorithms are as sophisticated or as precise when it comes to interpretation, as say, Therium. But really what you're looking at is the complexity of the data sets. And so how well can we how well is the AI trained? Who's been training it and what databases has it been searching and how well is it trained to come to its conclusions? Because I don't care, how skilled is a clinician you are? You're you're probably not going to be able to actually create the precise interpretations yourself off of all these various metabolites and their critical ratios. So you what I really try to do with testing is to vet and I think everybody has great quality. I'm not I'm not I'm not suggesting anyone test out there is not really good or exceptional or maybe better than the testing I'm using. I'm just talking about my experience in this space is getting to know the researchers behind the test, getting to know their particular pedigrees and experience and the you know their domain of expertise within where this testing is reported to go and how they're building out their AI neural engines and the data sets has got access to to train itself to me that's the critical piece. And I and then in some matter of does it actually add value to the clinical process because this is important to know, right? Like we talked about this earlier there's all this information we can gather. How you're going to apply it is the critical piece. And ultimately there is a major gap between where most people are starting off on their health journey of health optimization and where you know that they could be taken like most people you're going to start with these foundations we're talking about. Yeah. And mitigate stress start cleaning up the toxins clean up the environment work on the gut replete nutrients support antioxidants like for most people that step one and for for people who are new to this type of medicine that's a lot. That is life changing. Yeah. They went from taking a multivitamin to you know using a lot of different resources but it was life changing and they buy in because not only do they experience the result you can measure the result and show them the result. So it's a matter of is this additional data going to meaningfully change? What am I going to do for this individual human system? Is it you know or is it just marginal? And I believe there's the metabolomic space will be highly competitive and many people have brilliant AI. Therium will have many competitors. I don't have a financial relationship with Therium at all. It's just a tool. I do have a very friendly relationship with their team because I've asked for an enormous amount of their time going through reports and getting to know them. But uh well they love that about you though. Yeah but ultimately what at this point in my assessment of what's available from a metabolomics I believe Therium is the best test in the marketplace for actionable information meaningful information. It's not marginal. It's not going to you know like it's really going to help me it's going to reveal the blind spots and help me dial in as I mentioned earlier potentially use less interventions regular than more interventions for a human system to move in the direction that it wants to. With metabolomics to the extent that is accurately indexing the toxicants nowadays like depending on people's financial situation I might not run the full talks report to start. I may just look at what's going on metabolomically and if it's not too bad then we might just be able to to match a detox to what's going on and measure it that way. I'm not running comprehensive interest cell year nutrient reports any longer because I trust Therium to point me to those potential deficiencies in insufficient. Honestly I don't really unless it's a neurodegentive case I don't really run pro-dram any longer either because the functional aspects are actually well elucidated on Therium. Now what I don't have on Therium yet is the Inventory of phospholipids and plasma agents but they tell me that's coming and they are actually looking at phospholipid as a component of cell membrane. So there are a lot of times reports will say you need a lot of phospholipidol cooling right. You need a lot of phospholous Therium. So right now what I'm doing and I feel like for most people it gets me there I always want the full blood panel always. Yeah that is absolutely key. And then I as much of the subjective as I can possibly get and I do think things like functional metrics like VO2 max and exercise capacities and strength and hand grip strength and all of those and walking pace those are all really important and helpful. And then I use the Therium and if the person's interested I'll add epigenetic H testing and look at pace of aging and look at that you know and what I have also seen is that when aging pathways do look compromised on Therium not always but if you say a new patient who hasn't been doing this type of work we'll also see that pace of aging is over one on their epigenetic H test which has been interesting in your case it's not and it's not likely going to ever get there it could have tracked in that direction. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it wasn't going to get there. So despite all the technologies that are available at the end of the day there's still just a few a handful I think that make the difference in our clinical assessment and how we guide a patient on a journey of health. Yeah yeah to stress piece that we talked about earlier the sympathetic. Yeah so autonomic herbiv system testing of some sort. Yeah yeah is absolutely yeah okay so let's move into our final stretch here. Our future outlook hope direction and next gen longevity. So given everything that you're seeing the sympathetic dominance the toxicity the nutrient gaps the environmental load what gives you optimism about the future of human health. Well and you're not optimistic. I am an optimistic guy one I really firmly believe in the brilliance of human design. I do I believe we have amazingly adaptive systems that are oriented to life itself but beyond that towards thriving. Yeah yeah yeah yeah that's part of all of our neuro transmitter involvement and the way we fill the healthier that we get and I believe that is a strong primal driving force within human beings. I think it was easy for a generation to tune out into the status quo as long as the manifestations of diseases were not like what they are now right so most people didn't have diagnoses of metabolic diseases and most people didn't have fibromyalgia and severe my all these things. It was easy to kind of tune out and just coast now because of the awareness of the trajectory of chronic disease in our population what's happening in our aging population which is people are getting dementia at younger ages cancer at younger ages vascular disease issues at younger ages like lifespan is reducing health span is reducing people see that and they're they're like okay I need to pay attention right so part of this is sort of waking us up and allowing that deep seated primal drive towards life and thriving to activate motivate and and take us where we want to go. I also firmly believe your body will teach you like the more that you do this the more that you don't necessarily always have to do a test you know right you you you're able to intuitively understand what's going on in your own body and what it's attuning you to and what its specific needs are at this time and being able to move in those directions. Now the other feet piece that I don't want to miss one to go there because it makes us technology dependent but I'm optimistic because the technologies right because yeah because of how quickly on the I just mentioned that on the diagnostic side that right now I'm you know not necessarily like we've got all these incredible things there's we didn't bring up full body MRI we do arterial assessment CIMT a order coronary calcium scores potential CT angiograms so these are important things that I didn't mention earlier that are part of my testing arterial health and defelial function that we also do as part of our evaluations there's grow liquid bobsie cancer screening and there's another test that thinks going to be better coming out so these are all still potentially important but the rapid expansion so I think that when we do have accurate and actionable multi-omics where we have the metabolism proteome transcriptome full genome sequencing and biome integrated with that that we're going to be able to like it's going to be amazing how we can really begin to tune our human systems in the way that they're needed and build up that resiliency and then imaging modalities and then in the regenerative space the the the biologics right so stem cells manipulated stem cells exosomes exosomes combined with peptides use themselves these things have enormous promise for human systems and so I think that as these technologies get the right research behind them and the and we understand really what they can do what they can't do and it's gonna it's gonna evolve so quickly it's gonna oh it's yeah it's exponential today the hottest best most potent stem cell that has been manipulated in these particular ways with growth factors and differentia is gonna be replaced within a year within even better right they can possibly do more precise work in a human system and so I believe that the technologies because this pursuit of living our healthiest life is obviously critical for everyone it's a big target there's an enormous amount of financial capital in it trillions of dollars will be invested in this space and I believe we're gonna end up in a situation for people who are willing to submit to a deeper level of testing and willing to submit to using interventional protocols to tune their system that they're gonna be able we're gonna we're gonna leave behind this story of chronic disease I really do that it's gonna take time and it's gonna take awareness you're you're part of that by having this podcast and putting some action out there thank you all right well you answered my second question so we'll go to the last question which is if you could give every listener one simple actionable step to improve their metabolomic health signature this week what would it be just walk to go take walks outside in a pretty serene safe space beautiful I love it yeah broad spectrum sunlight no sunglasses on right yes no sunglasses on get the photon receptors working on your retina just walking outdoors in a serene place that feels safe works on so it works on mitochondrial biogenesis mitochondrial function it works on stress response systems autonomic gut biome like it that that that would be if you're only doing one thing that'd be the thing I do I love it doctor guest Vickery you rocked it as always thank you for easy to rock it with you Nat you are so why don't we just leave people with where do they find you like if somebody wanted to work with you or someone in your clinic I mean I know you've now expanded the clinic you have more practitioners there so how do people find doctor guests yeah so my personal website is doctor doctor v dr v uh i'm sorry wait i don't know it's doctor guest vickery dot com dr guest vickery dot com and that's a site that honestly we're really more minimizing and directing people to our authentic health website which is www dot authentic health dot com which is our clinic site and most of the content blogs podcasts and interviews and things that I've had posted at my personal site have now moved over we're integrating and building that out because we're really our clinic has called authentic health we're a team we're on this mission right of helping everybody that we can help and you know it was founded in primary care for all those years of just community medicine and uh we and so we're really trying to make this more about this team and its mission and what it's doing rather than me personally and so authentic health dot com is probably the best place to learn more about us but at that personal site there are there is more specific information about me amazing I love it and I've sent a couple people your way and I got to tell you guys the reviews are always phenomenal so and that's not always the case so thank you for the work that you do thank you for always being willing to take the call and listen to the oh my god you're not going to believe what I just got I love it I've become completely clueless of what's going on out there if I didn't have you Natalie oh thank you so much Gus it's been a pleasure and until we meet again until we meet again if folks just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only no medical advice no diagnosing no treatments suggested here before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here make sure that you check with your medical provider