TRANSCRIPTS : MODULE 2 - Amazon S3 · Transcripts Module 2 (Page 1) Kevin: Welcome everyone! This is Kevin Gianni from the Blood Test Blueprint Program, and

TRANSCRIPTS : MODULE 2

MEDICAL DISCLAIMER

The information in this program is for educational purposes only. It is meant to as a

guide towards health and does not replace the evaluation by and advice of a qualified

licensed health care professional. For detailed interpretation of your health and specific

conditions, consult with your physician.

Transcripts Module 2 (Page 1)

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Kevin: Welcome everyone! This is Kevin Gianni from the Blood Test Blueprint Program, and we’re starting part 2 right now. Dr. Williams, let’s get started.

Dr. Williams: We’re going to start to take a look at the comprehensive metabolic panel now, and we’re going to pick out of there…we’re going to look at kidney function tests and liver function tests and your total protein and your albumin levels. So on your comprehensive metabolic profile, just as an introduction, there are 14 markers that are standardly used. The first one always at the top is your serum glucose. Now I’m going to talk about that under blood sugar tests, so we’ll leave that. And then the next group are your kidney functions, and those are your BUN, which is blood urine nitrogen, your creatinine, and then something that you’ll see on your test is a small e, and then capital G, capital F, capital R. That’s the glomerular filtration rate. And the filtration rate is a very important marker that gives you an idea of aging, if it goes down. It gives you an idea of your strength of your body, because kidneys are vitally important for your homeostasis. They help regulate blood pressure, electrolytes in your body; they play so many key roles that you want your kidneys always to be as strong as possible. And then, they also have some ratios in there, and also the albumin, which we’re going to talk about, is both related to liver and kidney disease. And then of course, electrolytes also play a role with the kidney. But where I’m going to focus on for a kidney is your eGFR. So the range is greater than 60. As it starts to drift down towards 50, that’s too low. If it’s below 50, way too low. Now the optimal is going to be 60 or greater. And if you’re up to 100 or 120, that means your kidneys are working really, really well. And again, getting kidney function to be optimal is really important. If your eGFR is below 60, you need to start working on it. And if it’s below 50, that’s something you need to talk to your doctor about.

Now, what can you do to improve kidney function? Well, you want to make sure that you’re not getting too much protein, because the kidneys process a lot of the amino acids that go through and when the body can’t digest all the protein, all these amino acids circulating in your bloodstream, and the kidney will try and get rid of them. And you don’t want a lot of protein spilling on your urine, which means you don’t want a lot of excess protein. Now, if you are doing body building, if you’re doing aggressive exercise, even say a strong form of yoga, like Ashtanga yoga, you will use... you’re not going to build a lot of muscle, but you can tear down muscle because you’ll become thinner and thinner and perhaps more flexible, but have less muscle because your body is using it up. So you may need to eat a little bit more. And you’re going to use that up. But if you’re sedentary or just exercising regularly, too much protein is not good for the kidneys. And so make sure that you’re getting a standard amount of protein—65 to 80 grams maximum; 65 for women, 85 for men. And even a little bit less if you’re not that active. Even for women, down to 45, and for men, down to 65. But if you’re getting more than 85 and you’re not doing really aggressive exercise, then the first step is to…if you want to help your kidneys, is to back down, adjust your protein to your exercise level, to your muscle level, to your size of your body, and to the strength of your kidneys.

Also, don’t overuse herbs and supplements, because they are also not only processed through the liver, but much of them are processed through the kidneys, and you

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overburden them. I see patients who come in who have 4, or 5, or 6 herbal formulas, each having 6 or a dozen herbs in them, plus their super foods, and the kidneys are just not able to take that. The first thing I do is take them off. If you’re taking herbs, you want to take them for a specific purpose. Take only what you need, and then discontinue when there’s a correction. However, there is some...in Chinese medicine again, there is one formula that’s specific for the kidney. It’s called the Romania 6. It’s based on...built around the Romania, prepared Romania root, and in Chinese it’s called the Liu Wei Di Huang Wan, which means 6 taste Romania tea. And also ginseng itself is a useful kidney tonic. And in the Western herbs, there are three that I like to use to help the kidneys, and they’re often combined in various formulas in tinctures, which works just great because you’re going to drop them into water. And you’re going to take asparagus root, corn silk and uva ursi are my choices. And don’t forget—you need a lot of water in your body, 6 to 8 glasses of water a day. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, you need to take at least 1 liter for every 20 minutes of sweating when you’re in the sauna or doing a lot of exercise. So often we need a lot more water, a lot more fluid than we think we do, and that’s also the important key to improving your kidneys. And then watch your glomerular filtration rate go up.

Now let’s look at your liver functions. Liver functions of course are super important, because your liver is doing all of the detoxifying in your body, but also there’s so many diseases now that affect the liver. And if your total serum albumin is low, we get a suspicion that we have a liver problem, and we’ll talk about protein and albumin in a moment. But the liver tests that we’re going to look at are essentially your alkaline phosphatase, sometimes abbreviated as AP or ALK PHOS, and it has at the end the TASE—that’s an enzyme. And then the abbreviations are commonly used for the next two, the AST, also called the SGOT, and the ALT, the SGPT. The alkaline phosphatase is not only a liver marker, but it’s also a cardiac marker if it’s abnormal. The range is 25 to 150, and we want that to be in the range. It’s very important too if it’s low, that suggests that it’s dietary deficiency, because phosphorus is a compound that comes from your food—mostly from meats, but also from vegetables. And you’ll see that people drift down, down, down, down, down if they’re not eating enough or they’re not eating the right foods. So low alkaline phosphatase…first step is to look at deficiency and then to increase that.

What we’re more concerned about is high levels. If your AST is within range—0 to 40—you’re great. The lower the better, but not all the way down to 0. Around 5 or 10 is more optimal. And the ALT, 0 to 55. Again, in the 20’s or down to 10 or so is really, really optimal. When it pushes up toward the far end of the range, there’s no disease there, but the functional aspect of the liver may be a little bit low. So, when the AST and ALT are rising up above the ranges, then something is definitely going on with the liver. They are non-specific markers. In other words, they don’t go to a specific disease, but when we see the ALT go high, we start to think of perhaps a virus in the liver like hepatitis C. When the AST starts to go high, we start to think of perhaps fatty liver disease or some other inflammation in the liver. And everybody knows how important the liver is I believe now, and we want to get those markers always in optimal. And the first thing that we can do is the general liver detox juice…green juice fasting is just marvelous for the liver. And I recommend 1 to 3




days once a month to restore your liver, or a longer green juice fasting. Not a full water fast, but a green juice fasting. Foods that are really good on a daily basis to help the liver are dandelion greens, arugula, artichokes, and especially radishes are all great for the liver. And then the two herbs that I like to use are the milk thistle and chelidonium. And the chelidonium we use in a tincture form, and that’s 1/3 tsp three times a day. The milk thistle I like to use an extract form 250 mg twice a day.

Kevin: All right, let’s move into the third testing group that we have for our program here, which are lipid tests. And I think this is probably a pretty popular one, so this is one that you really want to listen in to, because I’m sue that either you or you know someone who has high or maybe even low cholesterol. We’ll be talking about both of those.

Dr. Williams: Yes, your standard lipid panel includes your total cholesterol, your triglycerides, your HDL or high density cholesterol, and your LDL, your low density cholesterol, and then also something called the VLDL or the very low density cholesterol. These are as we know, very important cardiovascular risk markers, and let’s take a look at them one by one. The first thing we look at is your total cholesterol, and laboratory ranges go from 100 to 199. And the desirable range is really under 150. We don’t want to be up towards 200. That’s not good enough for my patients. I want everybody to be lower than 150. And then there’s two optimal ranges here. One is where, kind of the standard where you’re really good, and that’s 145 to 165 mg per deciliter, and then there’s another optimal range where if you start from high cholesterol, you want to push it a little bit to the extreme down and get it to 125 to 145.

Now, what does it mean to have optimal ranges on your lipid profile? That means that when you’re in the optimal range category, you have 0 risk for cardiovascular disease. How important is that? Super important. You can’t stay alive, you can’t live well, you can’t live optimally, you can’t feel right if you have problems with how your vessels, your blood vessels are, the health of your blood vessels, how they’re working, and how they’re help circulating blood—or the heart itself, how it’s circulating blood. And the blood fats, the lipids, are a big part of the problem if you have too much or they’re getting clogged up or you’re not utilizing them. But also we find that they also participate in, particularly LDL, in not only increasing your cardiovascular risk for heart disease, but also play a role, a cross-over role, in metabolic disease, and that has to do with your blood sugar, which will be the next group of tests, and insulin and insulin resistance. So number 1 is getting your total cholesterol down. Now, some people, very important, have a genetic tendency to have cholesterol around 200 no matter what they do, and how much of a plant-based diet they eat, they just don’t seem to be able to get it down. And that’s alright as long as their other markers are good, because you’ll see in a moment that it’s the ratios that are really important.

The next one is your triglycerides—it’s the fatty sugar and goes up a lot with metabolic disease, and of course it goes up when you’re eating more fatty foods and more sweets. So the lab range is 0 to 149. The desirable range is less than 100.




I like to see patients less than 70, and the optimal range is below 50. So like 35 is perfect. And the LDL, we’ll look at that first. That’s the bad cholesterol, so-called bad cholesterol, and the range on the LDL is 0 to 99, and desirable is to definitely be under 99, under 100, but optimal is less than 79. And if you can get your LDL down to 35, it’s really outstanding. That’s like 0 risk.

However, you also have to have good cholesterol at a strong level, and that’s your HDL. And the range for HDL is greater than 39. The standard ranges run from 39 to 150. And the new lab tests show no upper end of the range. However, in some cases too high is not so good. I want my patients to be greater than 60, and if they’re higher than 65, then they’re into the optimal range. So all of a sudden—I think you can pick this up right now—is that, what we have is three markers that we want to be low, and one marker that we want to be high. We want the HDL to be as high as we can get it, and we want the total cholesterol, triglycerides, and LDL to be lower. And that forms a ratio. It’s very easy to do. You can do your own with... and all you have to do is, you’re using the HDL as the lower number, and then cholesterol, for the cholesterol, total cholesterol, sometimes called TC or CHOL with a slash, HDL ratio—you want that to be first of all, hopefully within range, but desirably it’s going to be lower than the lab ranges. The lab ranges give us 3.9 to 5.7 for the cholesterol to HDL ratio. I like it to be less than 3.5, and optimal is less than 2.5. On your triglycerides to HDL ratio, you divide your triglycerides into HDL. There’s no laboratory ranges—standard ranges—but the desirable range that we use in the clinic is less than 2.2, which is also the optimal range, and we also like to see is as below 2 if possible. And then the real important one is your LDL to HDL ratio. You divide your LDL by the HDL and you get your ratio. The number laboratory ranges 0.5 to 3.0, and of course we want to see patients as low as possible. Desirable less than 2.0, and if they can get down below 1.5 or 0.5, that’s super great.

Now what can we do? If we have high total cholesterol, the first thing you want to do is remove the fats and oils from your diet. If you go onto a vegan, low-fat, or no-fat diet for 3 months, almost 100% of people will normalize their lipid profile and even move those to optimal. I’ve seen people say, “I can’t, no matter what I do, what I do”, but 3 to 5 months on a vegan diet will optimize your cholesterol in almost every case. So that’s the first thing. Some people who are not able to do an extreme vegan diet, they’re going to have to eat more plants, they have to eat no meat, and they’re going to have to reduce all of their fat and oil consumption. That means no butter, no olive oil, no flax oil for those three months to get it down.

The supplements that we need to use are red yeast rice cxtract, which is a natural lovastatin, and the dosage is 600 to 1,200 depending on the size of the person. Bigger people need full 1,200 and most women and less heavy people need 600 mg twice a day, as taken with meals. Now there are a couple of other substances that are very useful for lipid health, and those are phytosterol complexes, and those are groups of plant sterolins that come from plants. They’re not steroids, and they are complexes, so they’re kind of bundled naturally together. And the dosage range is 850 to 2,500 mg a day. And then also policosanol, 10 to 20 mg twice a day. Policosanol is really interesting. It comes from Cuba, and it’s in the sugar cane root. And you




can buy that in Cuba. And the studies in Cuba show great success on lowering total cholesterol, LDL, and raising HDL. Well when the nutraceutical industry picked up on that, and because of the embargo we couldn’t get Cuban policosanol, so they found that they can also get policosanol from bee’s wax. So they made policosanol from bee’s wax, and when they studied it in the United States it didn’t work. And all of the early policosanol supplements back in the late 80’s and early 90’s that I used in my practice didn’t work. Then they took the Cuban policosanol and they took it to Canada, where they had good relationships, and they repeated the Cuban studies and it worked. And then the Canadian nutraceutical companies took...and we did it here as well because we grow lots of sugar cane, huge amounts of sugar cane in south Florida. And we took the sugar cane root, and of course everything in America has to be spic and span, and they washed all the root, all the mud off and everything like that. And then they prepared from the root and they made a policosanol, and it didn’t work that good. So they went back to the drawing board, and here you find that something has to do with the mud on the sugar cane root, and the way they were preparing it in Cuba actually worked. They went back to Canada, repeated the studies with the mud and then they’re still working on trying to find the best policosanol nutraceutical, but we’re getting closer. Now it works okay.

And then some of the super foods that are good for lowering cholesterol…one of those is from the bergamot family, it’s a citrus bergamot called citrus bergamia, and the dosage is 500 mg a day. And then there’s also a lot of the polyphenolic compounds from many of the super foods that contain flavonoids work very, very well. Also green tea and green tea extract is very, very useful to help lower cholesterol. So if you’re going to do it all natural, then you want to… plant-based diet, vegan if possible, 3 to 5 months, take the red yeast rice extract and support it with some of these super foods, and maybe policosanol and phytosterols, and of course please remember that exercise, burning off the fat through exercise—vigorous exercise—is indispensable for improving your lipid profile.

How do you get your LDL down? You lower your total cholesterol. So everything I just mentioned is what’s going to work there. And then one herb has a really unbelievable effect, which we didn’t know until the Germans studied it further, and they found that some of the test subjects, their LDL was going down, and that’s ginkgo biloba, which comes from the ginkgo tree, and traditional Chinese medicines used for asthma, but the German scientists found that it had an affect on micro-circulation. They first used it for a condition called “intermittent claudication,” where you start to walk and you get pain in your legs. It worked very well, and then they thought well if it works on the lower extremity, the ankles and feet, maybe it works on the brain, and of course ginkgo’s known as a memory booster. But as they did the studies, they saw people’s LDL going down, and their HDL going up. So just don’t overlook when you’re modulating high LDL to add in ginkgo biloba. You’re going to use an extract, and it’s 250 mg twice a day.

Now HDL is so important. You have to have strong HDL. If it’s low, it’s quite difficult to get up. However, my patients, their numbers go up, usually not a lot, but they do go up gradually. Exercise—that’s vigorous exercise—is very important, and then




the one supplement that’s very useful is niacin, and that’s 50…500 rather, to 1,500 mg a day. Remember that niacin causes extreme flushing, and some people more so than others, so always take it with food and always drink a nice glass of water with that. The pure niacin works better than the non-flushing form, but non-flushing forms also work quite as good as pure niacin, and if you have a tendency to flush too much, then use the non-flushing and inositol nicotinate, 750 up to 1,500 mg or more a day, combined with exercise, combined with lowering total cholesterol, combined with ginkgo biloba is the way to get your HDL up.

Kevin: Let’s move into blood sugar tests, which is #4 here, and this is a very important one because I was just reading recently that diabetes is at an all-time high, and pre-diabetes as well. And so there’s a lot of markers that you can look on your blood test for pre-diabetics that the doctor again will send you home and say, “Hey, nothing’s wrong.” And then a couple years down the line you turn into...your pre-diabetes turns into full fledged diabetes, and you’re wondering, how did this happen? When they’re actually markers that are showing beforehand. So let’s talk about glucose, and hemoglobin A1C, and how you can really help get your blood sugar levels, your insulin all regulated so you don’t have to deal with any pre-diabetic or diabetic conditions.

Dr. Williams: Yes, the blood sugar tests are part of the...what I call the “metabolic critical point” or “tipping point” in the body. And we know that full Diabetes is a horrible disease. It always accelerates aging, it always leads to early death, and it participates in many other diseases and makes you more susceptible to cancers and of course to cardiovascular disease. So we don’t want anybody to be diabetic. Now, what we’ve found is that, as you said, that even pre-diabetics have some degree of all of the propensity to have cardiovascular disease, a propensity to be overweight, a propensity to have more cancer, to have lower immunity. And then now we’re finding even—the latest research I was reading in the last few weeks—is that it’s even worse than that. If you’re not in the optimal ranges for glucose, you’ll have accelerated aging, propensity…predisposition for cardiovascular disease, and a more of a predisposition for cancer, and immune dysfunction. So your blood sugar or your glucose in the serum is a really key marker, and it always comes in your comprehensive metabolic panel, and it’s right at the top of the list of the 14 markers. And it’s listed as glucose, comma, serum. The range for the lab is 65 to 99. Above 100 is pre-diabetes, and above 126 is diabetes. What I’m more concerned about is the...not optimal range, or having trouble with glucose metabolism, and those are the people who always run in the 90’s. So if I see a patient that’s 91, 94, 95, a conventional physician will just say, “Oh ,you’re not diabetic, that’s great!” But I ask my patients, “Do you want to be optimal? If so, then we need that to be a little less…91, 94, 95 is not good enough. We need that to be...I used to think that a 90, 92 was okay, 89 was okay, but now the recent research says that anything above 85 is not okay. So my optimals have always been 75 to 85, and now I’ve just shifted them down to an optimal range of 74 to 84. Remember that the range is 65 to 99, so we’re talking about the higher end, and where we land in the optimal. But what about 70? What about 65? That starts to border on hypoglycemia, so you don’t want to be too low, even borderline low. And that’s when people start having




hypoglycemic-like events. They’ll be drowsy after meals, or they’ll be crabby before they eat, and then feel much better afterwards. That’s a little bit kind of borderline reactive hypoglycemia, so getting your blood sugar in the optimal range and trying to hold it there is really important.

We’re going to look at another test—that’s the hemoglobin A1C. Now, that gives you an average of 5 months of what your blood sugar range will be, and so I always run hemoglobin A1C on all of my patients. And the range—it’s in a percentage—and the range is 4.8% to 5.6%. Now, even the lab and the science knows that as that marker goes up, it increases our risk for diabetes. So if it’s above 6.4%, you’re already at the diabetic range, and they really want you to be below that. But even if you are at 5.7% to 6.4%, you’re in increased risk. If you’re in 4.8% to 5.6%, that’s acceptable. However, for my patients, what I want that to be is even lower. I like it to be at 5.2% or less—even better than that if we can get it around…4 points…in the 4-point something—4.9%, 4.4%, and 4.8% is perfect. So you want your glucose to be in the range of 74 to 84, and your hemoglobin A1C to be consistently in the…below 5.2%—in the range of 4.8% to 5.2%.

The other marker is your insulin level, which is a hormone. We’re going to talk about hormones at the very end of the next part of this program. But here I want to mention that if you’re looking at your insulin, it’s either going to be too high or too low, and it’s going to be associated with your glucose. Low insulin and high glucose is type 1 diabetes, but high insulin and high glucose is type 2 diabetes, or insulin resistance. And so insulin is a very important marker that we keep it within normal ranges, and not too high and not too low. I like to keep my patients’ insulin levels between 5 and 10.

Now what can we do? The first thing is watch our dietary sugar. You have to have no refined sugar—and also refined carbohydrates break down to sugar—and also not too much protein, because protein is going to break down, if you can’t utilize it. into sugar in your body. So no refined sugar, no refined carbohydrates, and just the right amount of protein. Also, sometimes people eat too much fruit. Very high in sugar, not much nutrient value. And so fruitarians are at risk for diabetes. They may have low cholesterol, but have high blood sugar. And remember that all the great natural sweeteners like agave syrup and organic, even organic raw honey, are also sugar substances. So too much of any of those can also—if you’re susceptible especially—can raise your blood sugar. Now exercise is super important because you’re going to burn up, you’re going to use up all the calories and the sugars going to be used up, the fruit sugar, the fructose, is going to be used up. So again, lifestyle support is exercise. And then having enough fiber, having enough whole grains, so that inside your body, it takes energy to digest. So you don’t want to have all easy-to-digest soft foods, or not all juices, because there’s no strength to the digestion there. So you want to exercise your body on the outside, and exercise it from the inside with whole grains and plenty of fiber.

The #1 super food is yacon syrup. That’s a Peruvian super food, and it’s fairly sweet, but it does not raise your blood sugar. It helps to lower your blood sugar, and it helps to lower hemoglobin A1C. And it’s a super pre-biotic. It helps to promote




normal intestinal-friendly flora. Another super food is the Orleans strawberry, the fragarius. And you’ll start to see that come up in more nutraceuticals. Very, very good for managing blood sugar. In the terms of supplements, the place where I start is with GTF or glucose tolerance chromium. It’s derived from yeast, and not all chromium is the same. Chromium picolinate won’t work. Only this GTF chromium works to help modulate the blood sugar. Chromium is the key nutrient. Just like zinc is for the immune system, chromium is for glucose metabolism. And if your blood sugar is too high, you’ll need 200 to 400 mcg with every meal of chromium, either during the meal or immediately afterwards. The next most important is alpha lipoic acid—ALA—and it has to be in relatively high dosages, will help drive down blood sugar beautifully, 250 to 500 mg twice a day. Sometimes we have to go to 500 or 600 mg twice a day. Remember—it must be taken with food, because it’s a little bit strong on the bare stomach lining, so make sure you take it with food. Other supplements that are very useful is vitamin E, the dosages to manage blood sugar are 1,000 IU a day, and omega-3 fatty acids has to be 1,000 three times a day. To get your hemoglobin A1C down, you have to be consistent in lowering your total fasting glucose. And then to improve your insulin level, if it’s too low, cinnamon acts almost like a natural insulin, and helps to raise up your insulin. I don’t like to see my patients—often you see them less than two, which means they can’t measure their insulin, and that’s too low. And if it’s too high, that suggests insulin resistance and metabolic disease, and the goal there is to lower your glucose and to lower your total cholesterol, and your LDL. So everything that we talked about that lowers glucose, improves glucose metabolism, and gets you a healthy lipid profile will also lower insulin. And of course, balancing adrenal hormones are very tightly associated with insulin resistance, and stress, of course…managing stress.

Kevin: And then what if your glucose is too low? What would you do to bring that back up?

Dr. Williams: If your glucose is too low and you have hypoglycemia, then the solution is not eating more sugar, or move fruit, or more agave, or more honey, because you actually will feel better, because you’ll quickly raise up your sugar, but then you’ll have another crash down. Means that you’re either overly-processing or not processing correctly your glucose on the opposite end of the spectrum. And hypoglycemia—you’re very tired, you’re very moody, you’re very irritable. If it’s severe, you start to have sort of like cold sweats, a bead right on your forehead or nose. And people feel very, very drowsy and sometimes they have to actually lie down. If they’re driving in the car they have to pull over, and if they eat something they’ll feel much, much better almost immediately. Having a good solid stable diet and eating several meals a day, 4 or 5 times a day, keeping your protein—we’re going to slant this time towards the protein—and normal amounts of healthy whole complex carbohydrates, normal amounts of fruits...that’s 1 or 2 fruits a day, and maybe a little bit of normal amounts of honey...a tablespoon a day or a tablespoon of agave a day. But focus on the proteins. You need protein in every meal. It breaks down slower. And complex carbohydrates like brown rice, millet, and quinoa. And then take the same supplements that we used to normalize the blood sugar. That’s the alpha lipoic acid, the vitamin C, and the GTF chromium, along with vitamin E, and omega-3’s.




Kevin: Alright, let’s move into part #5, which is high homocysteine.

Dr. Williams: So what do you do when you have high homocysteine? There’s a lot of things you can do, and there’s very specific markers, because homocysteine is a non-protein amino acid. It’s normally occurring in the body, but it builds up and if you have too much as I mentioned...and it’s not recycled properly by the body, the levels will build up in the blood and it causes a predisposition towards cardiovascular disease, and systemic inflammation in the body. So it’s...for optimal health you need homocysteine as low as possible. Very important to remember that it does not come from the diet—it’s something that builds up in your body, and it’s based on your body’s chemistry and your body genetics. The ranges in micromoles per liter (µmoles/L) and the standard laboratory range is—and they’re shifting all the time because we have a lot of new information on it—is between 5 and 12. Sometimes it’s 5 up to 14 or 15, but usually no lower than 12 in the standard laboratory ranges. Where we want to be in terms of desirable is less than 9, where optimal ranges are less than 6. And what I find more and more is that my patients who’ll have optimal health, who are eating great diet, who are exercising a lot, and their homocysteine levels will be even lower than 6. They’ll be down to 1, 2, or 3. So in naturopathic medicine, we say as close to 0 as possible.

So what do you do though if it’s elevated? Homocysteine is linked to vitamin B-12 and folate, or folic acid deficiency. So when you don’t have enough B-12, even if you’re eating a very strong plant-based diet, homocysteine levels could still be above the optimal levels. Remember—high plant-based diet, green juices, and green smoothies are going to give you plenty of folic acid. So folate is not likely to be enough, unless you have a gene mutation, what’s called the MTHFR—methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase. This is an enzyme that encodes…is encoded by this MTHFR—that’s the abbreviation—gene, and it helps the conversion of folate in the body, particularly in one particular chain in this amazingly complex, unbelievably beautiful cycle. And then if you don’t get the right conversion, you will build up homocysteine. It does not what we call “remethylate” in the body, and homocysteine levels will stay high. Usually people with 2 copies of the MTHFR...and this is another blood test that you can order—it’s called MTHFR gene mutation—and they measure for 2 copies of this gene. If you have both copies, then you have a particular type of commonly occurring gene mutation in this folic acid cycle. And you’ll have a tendency to have higher homocysteine, and it’s associated with a variety of diseases all the way from different types of cancer, to cardiovascular, to stroke, and even autism. So very, very important that you check this at least once in your lifetime.

If you don’t have them, you don’t need to retest that all the time. Sometimes people ask me to retest it, but it’s a very accurate test, and it doesn’t need to be consistently retested. Maybe once or twice maximum, just to check that the first test was accurate. But if you have this form of gene mutation, 2 copies, then you need a special form of folic acid called 5-methyltetrahydrofolate. And that’s a nutraceutical. It’s not available in the diet. It’s not available in food-based forms, except in minute dosages. And the therapeutic dose for those with the high homocysteine, or even borderline high, with these 2 copies of the MTHFR mutation, is minimum of 400




to 800 mcg daily. Occasionally, clinically, I have to push up to 5, sometimes to 10 mg a day. Now if you have...if you find that your homocysteine is still not going below 9; you’ve done everything, you’re exercising, your diet is great, it’s high plant-based and lots of green juices, you’re getting the right B-12, your levels are up, your folic acid levels are corrected, you’re taking a special bio-active form of the 5-methyltetrahydrofolate form in 400-800 mcg or maybe even a little bit more, but your homocysteine is still not going down; then you may have deficiencies in 2 other nutrients. One is B6. B6 is secondary, but very important and some people have trouble processing B6 in their body, and they need to use the co-factor form called P5P, or pyridoxal 5 phosphate, form of B6—or sometimes called an activated form—50 to 100 mg a day. And that, as a rule, corrects, and you see your homocysteine going down. Sometimes you have to use a little more B6. Now if that’s still not correcting it, then there may be a...well, there’s one other supplement that is often used. I don’t find it, clinically speaking, as a primary supplement that really does a lot of change in lowering the homocysteine. However, many formulas have it in the formula, and that is trimethylglysine or betaine. And that’s also not found in dietary sources. The dosage for betaine is 250 to 750 mg a day with food.

Kevin: Alright, so now let’s move into the 6th phase here: inflammation markers. And we’re going to be talking about C-reactive protein. I’m sure that you’ve probably heard about this, and if you haven’t, well you’re going to hear about it here. But you’ll be hearing more about it as something that is quite popular now, at least in the natural world, for judging inflammation in the body. And so Dr. Williams let’s talk about this.

Dr. Williams: Yes, inflammation markers there’s...we’re going to look at 3 basic ones. That’s going to be your C-reactive protein, and that…you want to measure it as cardiac C-reactive protein. That’s essentially, it’s a high sensitivity test, and it’s a more accurate marker than the generalized C-reactive protein. So always specify either highly sensitive or cardiac CRP or C-reactive protein. The other one is homocysteine, which we just talked about. And then the most general marker for inflammation is the sedimentation rate, also called the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, or ESR, or just SED rate. And then I just want to mention one other marker that, especially during aging, that we want to take a look and that’s the anti-nuclear antibody that’s associated with auto-immune disorders, and the chronic inflammation that tags along with that.

But of the three that we’re going to look at right now, C-reactive protein is the most important. What you also will find on your lab test is that, they’re going to give you ranges or risk-related ranges, and what conventional laboratory science looks at is where...as it goes up higher, just like in homocysteine. What we want to look at is what happens when it goes down, as well as when it goes up. But if your range is elevated, then you are at greater risk for heart attack, stroke and also for diabetes. So that…I think that tells you right now that what you’re going to do is you’re going to lower your glucose levels, you’re going to lower your homocysteine levels, you’re going to improve your nutrient levels, you’re going to increase your exercise, you’re going to lower your total cholesterol and the LDL, you’re going to supplement with omega-3’s and vitamin E—all of the things we talked about already. And it also




leads us into balancing the adrenal hormones. We’ve touched upon that. We’ll get into more detail later, and of course, that’s a topic on itself. Particularly cortisol helps the body regulate inflammation.

Back to…specifically to C-reactive protein. The ranges from... and it varies from the type of lab, but usually it’s going to be from 1 to 3. And if you’re in the range of 1 to 3, then your risk is considered low to moderate. As you move above 3, even a little bit, you go immediately into high risk. So if your C-reactive protein is 3.5, you’re already in high risk for those conditions, and you have generalized inflammation going on in your body, and we want to move that down. If you’re at 6 up to 10, you’re in very high risk, and if you’re greater than 10—and sometimes I have patients that are over 100—they’re very close to possible acute phase responses, or that means they’re headed for the cardiac emergency. And now…doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but it’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when, when they’re in that higher ranges. What we want is optimal. We want to be within range, 1 to 3. Even better, we want to be less than 2. And optimal, we want to be lower than 1.

Now, I’d like to say something here Kevin, is that, when I...and you started off in

the introduction by saying, you know, my experience and everything. After you do thousands and thousands of tests and you see the health of people, and the diseases of people, and you see…#1, you have to agree with the general conventional medicine that the higher the levels, like on C-reactive protein, that they’re definitely right, and those patients need very quick and very aggressive intervention, whether it’s homocysteine or C-reactive protein, and so forth. But when you see...where they don’t focus on at all is optimal. And more and more people are practicing like me, whether they’re holistic MDs or DOs, and of course naturopaths, and OMDs and DOMs, we’re all working and we’re all finding the very similar thing is that actually, you can go down below the average bell curve range, and that you start to bring your risk from moderate to low and down to 0. So when I look at my patients and I see they’re in this 0 risk range, that’s the optimal range and that’s where you never see anybody have a cardiovascular event, when they’re in that range. Never. Same with homocysteine. Same with the other markers. So when I say optimal range, I mean they’re in 0 risk range, and unless they’re are some genetic factors under the surface that we haven’t found, they never have these type of conditions that are so common in modern society like diabetes, like metabolic diseases, like liver disorders, fatty liver diseases, like cardiovascular diseases. And they live longer, and they’re healthier in middle and older age. And also very important is that everything we’ve talked about has nothing to do with age. None of these markers do not creep up just because you get older. In my 85- and 90-year-old patients, they have markers that are like healthy 26 years old. Their C-reactive protein is 0.5. Their homocysteine is 1 or 2. There’s no age...direct age-related high end of these markers that we’ve talked about so far. So C-reactive proteins is one of those that’s fairly important.

And what do you do? As I mentioned, you lower your glucose, you lower your total cholesterol, particularly LDL, you lower your stress to balance your adrenal hormones, and you support with your other supplements; your B6, your B12, your 5 MTHF—that’s the co-factor form of the folic acid that we talked about—and all of




your super foods, and you support that and you bring that down. In the clinic, of course, we have other ways to help accelerate that, but within 3 months you’ll see the C-reactive proteins going down. If you’re in the regular range, say you’re at 2.8, that’s probably okay if everything else is looking good, but many of my patients, they want optimal. They want to be on top of their game, and they want to stay there for as long as possible. So we’re really working with this kind of super-personalized medicine for these folks.

The next one is your sedimentation rate, and that’s a generalized marker that...of

inflammation. When I first started practicing, it was 0 to 10, and then as people got sicker and inflammation became more common, it was 0 to 20, then it was 10 to 20, and then it got all the way up to 30! So I like to go back to where I was…that your sedimentation rate, your SED rate, your ESR or however your lab puts it, labels on your test…I want my patients to be less than 10. Optimally, we’re going to be less than 5, and super-optimal is going to be as close to 0 as possible. Now remember—that can go up a little bit when you have a cold or flu, and so slight elevation on one test doesn’t count. But as you’re looking on the serial testing, you want to see that sedimentation rate gradually going down. And again, does that happen with my patients? Absolutely! And you can do it on your own without a doctor by following all the information that we provide in the programs.

The last one in this category is the anti-nuclear antibody, and it’s a positive or

negative test called the ANA. It’s associated with autoimmune activity, and it kind of tags along with these inflammatory markers. It’s also considered...that it goes up with aging, but my patients, elderly healthy patients, have normal ANA. So if you see your ANA as your first screening test, it’s a positive, then you want to do everything that we’ve talked about to lower your inflammatory markers, improve your glucose metabolism, improve your lipid health, and with nutrients, lifestyle, super foods, and herbs, and normalize that ANA.

Kevin: You mentioned this, and I think it’s probably an important thing to address right now. Is one test...we didn’t necessarily directly mention...but one test isn’t enough. So if you could just talk very briefly about the value of serial testing as you called it. I think that’s really important for everyone to know.

Dr. Williams: Okay, great! That is important, because you’re not going to get a good picture by just doing a snapshot. Remember when you do a blood test, it’s like a moving target. As blood is flowing by, depending on what you ate, depending on your supplements, depending on your stress levels, depending on your disease condition, and everything like that, that snapshot is just going to catch a moving target going along. It’s like taking a picture on a stream, and you see a lot of fish one day, and you think that you’re overflowing with fish, and the next day there’s no fish. So what’s different though about the river than the blood stream is that you’re a self-contained system, so your body maintains very tight levels throughout your entire body on a consistent basis, day in and day out, and daytime and nighttime, except for hormones that have diurnal rhythms—they go up and down. But the ones that we’ve been talking about so far are relatively consistent within specific ranges.




However, sometimes the tests are not…either not accurate, they’re not read right, or maybe your body chemistry is just having an off day. And so a single test doesn’t qualify for a total accurate reading, unless the symptoms and the clinical profile totally match up, of course. And then we can say, it looks like the patient and the paper, the 2 P’s, match up, and even though you’re feeling okay, the signs that I detect and the numbers say that you have low levels and you need to improve them.

Then we start to check and see—when are they improved? And that means you have to do serial testing. If you have low levels or high levels—say low levels of iron and you’re anemic—you want to do them in 3 months. Some tests in the clinic I’ll do every 30 days until we’re normal, but in standard, most frequent serial testing will be in 3 months. You want to see if you’re going in the right direction—if your time and your money spent on your supplements and everything is working. And then make adjustments according to the tests. If you have high levels of C-reactive proteins, say 30, you want to do a test in 3 months or less to make sure that that’s trending downward. So then you start to plot on a...you can do it on a spreadsheet, you can do it on...many of my patients do their own, sometimes we do it for them…but we start to see over time in the serial testing where their markers are. As they get healthier, then we’re going to do every 6 months, and when they’re very healthy and everything is close to spot on, then we’re just doing annual tests. And of course, you don’t have to follow everything when you’re doing the 3 month, you just want to check for the ones that are abnormal. If you’re ordering your own tests, you don’t repeat everything. For example, if your glucose is high, but your kidney and liver functions are great, you don’t need to do the entire CMP—except it’s very inexpensive, so some people like to run that. You can order if you want, just the glucose and the hemoglobin A1C. If your C-reactive protein is the only thing that’s off, or you want to see if that’s really going down, then you only order the C-reactive protein. But I do like to do an annual complete test even on my healthy patients who are looking for optimal personal wellness.

Kevin: So this is the end of module 2. We’ll have more with module 3 coming up.


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TRANSCRIPTS : MODULE 2 - Amazon S3 · Transcripts Module 2 (Page 1) Kevin: Welcome everyone! This is Kevin Gianni from the Blood Test Blueprint Program, and