I want you to understand when you were born, you were little bitty. I don't know. Your mom will tell you. Five, six, seven, eight, nine pounds, something like that. Now you weigh considerably more. Let's say, I'm guessing, let's say you're 115, 120 pounds, something like that. That's a difference of over 110 pounds from when you were born. That 110 pounds did not come out of thin air. You didn't photosynthesize it. It's not sunlight. That 100 plus pounds is from what you ate. Those were the building blocks to build who you are today.
Moving forward, you need to understand and ask yourself regularly when you see your food on the plate, "Do I want to build my body out of what's on that plate? Do I want to build my body out of steak and vegetables, or do I want to build my body out of mac and cheese and some crackers? Do I want to build my body out of McDonald's or Wendy's or Taco Bell, or do I want to build my body out of chicken and vegetables?" Those are questions we al...
Another common question that came up is, how do you swallow supplements? Some people have trouble swallowing pills. And so I give this advice quite a bit at the office. It usually works very well. The two things I point out to people, one is, "You swallow chunks of food larger than those pills on a very regular basis." If you were to take a bite of something, chew it up, and right before you swallow it, spit it out and look at it, don't do this in public, it's bigger than you think. And you swallow that stuff all the time without an issue. So a lot of times it's your brain getting in the way, making you tense, making you think you're going to choke, and it keeps you from doing that. So be aware, you swallow bigger things all the time.
The second important note to make is that pills and capsules behave differently when you swallow them or when you put them in your mouth. So if I were to put water in my mouth and then drop a solid tablet in my mouth, that tablet is going ...
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Hypothyroidism, TPO antibodies, some lab numbers kind of criteria for diagnosis and the physiology of making thyroid hormone. Let's talk about that today. I've had some questions lately. I realize I haven't done one of these videos in quite a while, so let's knock this out. Hashimoto's is going to be a name used for the condition of having antibodies toward your thyroid. I'm going to get a little more specific with you, but I think in common terms, I think we've come to the point where if you have an autoimmune thyroid condition, they're just going to call it. I think that's probably fine. I don't think getting super specific about that really makes much of a difference. You'll see why I say that in a minute. So if you have an autoimmune attack on your thyroid, it's going to be called Hashimoto's. Now, let's go through how you make thyroid hormone so that we kind of have the same terminology as I talk about testing and diagnosing.
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So you have a gland kind of tucked...
So a question I get regularly from patients is, can they get their family practice doctor, or gynecologist, or endocrinologist, whomever, to run our lab panels instead of us running them? Which I don't mind. I tell the patients regularly, I don't care who orders it. As long as it's got the components that I need, it'll work for us. So that comes up regularly.
Well, there are several reasons why we've had very little success getting other doctors to run our lab panels. So I just want to run through this real quickly. It's, again, something I answer pretty regularly during an average week at the office.
So number one, understand that I do functional medicine, and the lab panels that we've put together are specifically geared toward finding underlying mechanisms. Looking for problems before they are so far down the road that they're diagnosable. Looking for indications that there's dysfunction even if there's not disease at this point.
That's, to a large de...
Magnesium deficiency is probably the second most common nutritional deficiency in the industrialized world, right? Definitely in the us. Um, it, it kind of goes back and forth with vitamin D depending on who you talk to, but that's how it made its way onto our foundational five. We find magnesium deficiency in, I probably, I would say 50 or 60% of the patients in which we test magnesium. If they're not already supplementing with it, they end up being deficient in it. Um, vitamin D is probably a little bit higher than that. Um, and, and I don't know if that's just because more people are supplementing with magnesium, but it's an issue. So real quick testing for magnesium, uh, very specific test. You will get a magnesium test a lot of times in your regular lab work, but it is a serum magnesium test. The normal range will be somewhere between probably one and three, something like that.
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Um, and, and that's not an appropriate test for magnesium. It's accurate...
Next on our list of the foundational five is vitamin D. I've done videos on vitamin D in the past. Please go find them. Um, they're gonna have more information than I can put in this video here, but I'm gonna give you kind of a, a, a rapid overview on vitamin D. So, vitamin D, anti-inflammatory, anti autoimmune, immune regulating, anti-cancer, um, not directly, but helps our body do all these things, right? It supports our body's natural mechanisms for doing all these things. Um, so very important to have. It's generally considered the most, if not in the top two. Uh, magnesium being the other, uh, nutritional deficiencies in our bodies. Uh, we make vitamin D from the sun. Sun has to hit our skin, not really showing your skin there and interact with cholesterol. And that makes the first conversion that it has to go to the liver, get converted to the kidneys, get converted, then you finally get active vitamin D.
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So it's a multi-step process. Um, and there'...
So next on our list of the foundational five, we've already talked about multivitamins, we've talked about fish oil. This video, we're gonna talk about probiotics. And the next couple of videos we'll handle vitamin D and magnesium. So probiotics, those are the good bacteria that are supposed to be in our gut. Now, a couple of misconceptions about probiotics. Many people feel that when you take a probiotic, you are trying to colonize the gut with what you're taking. I mean, it wouldn't be bad if that happened. I think probably a little bit of that happens. But by and large, the reason you take a probiotic is that on its way through your system, while it's temporarily in there, it changes the environment somewhat. Those bacteria that you put in there, and sometimes nutritional yeast that you put in there, they ferment your food on their way through, and the byproducts of that fermentation set up an environment that's advantageous for your normal flora to kind of gro...
Continuing the foundational five series. The last video I did was on multivitamins. If you didn't catch it, look around wherever you're seeing this video and you'll find it. Today. I'm talking about the second component of the foundational five, and that's ul. So it as a recap, the foundational five generally supplements that I think everybody would benefit from. Same disclaimers I did on the last video. I'm not giving you medical advice. Take notes on what I'm telling you. If some of this is of interest or you think you want to take one of these, if there's any question about whether it's relevant for you or not, or safe for you or not, speak to your functional medicine practitioner, um, your nutritionist, somebody that understands supplementation. Alright? If you ask your regular family doctor about supplements, they may or may not have any knowledge at all about supplements in the information yet may be less relevant than what you're getting here, even though I...
To me, there are five main supplements that, that I kind of call my foundational five that almost everybody would benefit from taking. Now I say almost everybody, so understand real quick disclaimer, I'm not giving you medical advice. I don't know your specific situation, so take notes on what I'm gonna say and know that these are generally good for everybody, but there may be some special circumstances for you. So discuss that with your functional medicine doctor or your clinician practitioner who's knowledgeable about nutrition and supplementation. Your regular family practice doctor might not know much of anything about supplementation and they're not always the best, um, resource for whether or not you should or can be taking something, find someone knowledgeable about supplementation. So that being said, the foundational five for me, uh, it's gonna consist of number one, a multivitamin of some sort, fish oil, probiotics, vitamin D, and magnesium.
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Tho...
So you can't really go anywhere without hearing somebody talking about a low carbohydrate diet. There's whole 30, keto, low-carb paleo, diets that prioritize protein, fasting mimicking diets, fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore. We could go on all day with different diets that accentuate protein, or in the case of keto, protein and fat, at the expense of carbohydrate. I don't have a big issue with that. I think in many people, that's beneficial. But I want you to understand that whichever one of those you choose or whichever one of those is recommended to you or whatever, they all share a very common goal, a very similar goal. They go about it a little bit differently, but the goal is to expose you to a lot less insulin than you've been doing already. So I'm going to talk you through real briefly two or three different things to explain what insulin does and how it becomes a problem because we need it.
Why would you want less of it? So we're goi...
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