because mitochondria originally were bacteria that were outside of our bodies they're only inherited from the mother's side all your mitochondria are 100% related to your mom we have no mitochondrial DNA from your dad eventually over time the human body rather than allowing these independent bacteria to operate on their own kind of co-opt them and brought them into the cells now we have what's called a mitochondria my next guest develops his own model of functional medicine founded over 20 years ago and he's worked with over 8,000 patients in his private practice and he's certified over 700 practitioners to do the same worldwide today with us return him back to the stage is dr. Dan Kalish thank you for having me back appreciate it we were talking before the call it's been uh it's been three years that's a long time highs by doesn't it just languish I think I think you were guest number three so way back in the day and it's kind of funny full circle on that Chris Kelly was a guest we had on and he said that he got into he's doing his own functional medicine stuff now and has some podcast and he said he got into it because he heard the first show we did like three years ago in 2012 or something oh that's interesting how it comes around isn't it yeah and he ended up taking my training program too and I'm applying it to athletes in a really great way he didn't flunk out of it he made it there no as a matter fact he was one of those students was like oh my god he's gonna keep asking questions is super smart like super smart guy right yeah yeah yeah use great on the show he's talking about his BMX and athletic performance and testing and all that so good stuff but I love the last show we did and you set it up you went into your backstory just for the people who maybe you know three years ago it was a long time set it up for them how did you get to where you are now working with 8,000 people and training 700 practitioners in your Kalish method yeah that's a pretty good question you know I had a personal health crisis of my own when I was living in Thailand I picked up parasite and was in two years living in a monastery in Thailand came back to the States after that was really quite sick when we would now call Kron fatigue you know but this is a long time ago this is like I hate to say it was probably in the 80s you know and um I just couldn't figure out how to get better couldn't figure out what to do and started to pursue this thing called functional medicine as a patient basically and once I got my fatigue problem solved I was like hey this could be a good job you know maybe I should get into doing this for other people because I felt frustrated that all my regular doctors were like I don't really know what's wrong and you know I'm lying on the couch every afternoon unable to get up and I knew that I was sick so anyways that was kind of my inspiration and since those last 25 years you know it's been really a wonderful ride and we're seeing functional medicine now coming into its full bloom well we just at a conference on Monday night Cleveland Clinic is rockin and rollin with their functional medicine department they're doubling the size of it they ran out of space they got a long long waiting list there's other major university centers starting to get involved and it's gonna you know enter the mainstream now but you were doing it before it was cool right I was doing it way before it's cool yes and I'm gonna take full credit for that cuz I've I just forgot you know it's kind of funny because I was doing gluten-free diets yeah 25 years ago people look at you like oh that's Glynn and now you know it's almost you know I get I was at a restaurant in Arizona recently and this waitress comes up to us and she started to lecture me it's like this 20 year old waitress lecture me about the gluten-free menu I was like oh lady you don't even know this next generation coming in you know gluten-free cupcakes at Trader Joe's man that's my downfall right there sitting right there so last time you're on the show you brought up and categorized every single health problem people are really having down into five areas on your Kalish method book and these were fat fatigued depressed sex hormones and digestion and pretty much all our health issues can be categorized into any one of those and then once we categorize it we can kind of decide what we need to do what protocol we need to we need to do specifically for that is that kind of how setup put words in your mouth yeah I mean when we did it we did an analysis about 15 years ago like what are the top complaints like what am I actually doing what are people complaining about when they're coming in as new patients and it was in this order fat fatigue depressed sex hormone imbalances and digestive problems and there's 95% of my patients were complaining about one or all five of those problems in some cases and you know the funny thing about function medicine is that we're not necessarily we don't have specific treatments that just make people lose weight and then you don't get healthy in any other way and we don't have treatments that just fix your sex drive but then leave everything else alone right we're always treating the whole person but from a patient's perspective these are the five things that we hear most people you know complaining about and these are the things that people want to have fix so I think it's important to have the patient priority you know really clear and then behind the scenes like we're gonna talk about later today you can get into the science behind it and how all these Corrections are actually made yeah and so you know with some of those health complaints like fatigue or depression and digestion or sex hormones that might be a little obvious but what you do testing that's your big thing with functional medicine you know don't guess test you're a big fan of testing from what I remember correct oh absolutely my whole career is basically founded on understanding what tests to run and how to interpret them to design programs okay and so the person listening at home if they're maybe just eaten clean or they're trying to follow some elimination diet or maybe a paleo diet or a low-carb diet or anything like that but they've never done any testing they might be a little intimidated about testing what would you kind of say to that person are the the real benefits of testing well you know it's like taking an x-ray but of your brain or of your hormone systems so you might I don't know hit your toe really bad or crash on a bicycle or something and you're wondering how did I break it I don't know and you figure it out by taking an x-ray and it gives you a definitive clear picture of exactly what's wrong and that's how I see functional medicine lab work is they let you No is this in my head is there like a clear biochemical reason why there's a problem and when in this essence it's like a biochemistry version of an x-ray when you get a lab report back and you can see exactly what's happening with that hormone or with this oxidative stress marker or nutrient marker or whatever it is and people can't Intuit this stuff very well it's really hard to know if you have oxidative stress or a liver detox problem I mean you feel crappy in the same way regardless right so that that's the big problem is that the symptoms don't match the problem it's not a one-to-one connection like that so looking at the big five health problems the fat fatigue depressed sex hormones and I gesture I guess the one that stands out is fatigue we don't really talk too much about that on this call I know they kind of all overlap and stuff but before you know before I answer this next or ask this next question I'm gonna take some coffee I don't know if this is sacrilegious for fatigue but why why are people so tired why is fatigue such a major issue for a lot of people out there yeah and in my practice now I break it down to three categories and I find any one of these three or all three of these can be in play so there could be a hormonal reason hormonal down-regulation why you're tired could be cortisol could be thyroid hormones for women it could be estrogen or progesterone so you can have hormone problems you can have problems with your brain or a transmitter related issues the brain is inflamed the blame or the brain is under stress and you have problems like with dopamine that would make people very tired and then the third category and this is like I think the most mysterious and the least talked about and probably least understood by doctors and patients alike is mitochondrial energy problems which which simply means that you're not making energy inside the cells appropriately you're not making enough ATP or cellular energy and so of course you're tired because it's like the gasoline is run out of the car right you just don't have enough fuel to push yourself forward okay so that was hormones was the second one stress no hope so hormones brain brain brain we're no transmitters and then mitochondrial energy okay and you could have you could have all three of these you could have a hormone imbalance a brain problem and a mitochondrial energy issue all at the same time some people do what are some of the major causes of that like how do how do people get either hormone dysregulation or imbalance or mitochondria dysfunction I know for you yet a parasite you said entired so here's this is where functional medicine gets complicated because everything can cause everything and so like for example parasitic infection or a food reaction like gluten intolerance that could cause a hormone issue or a poor brain issue or it could definitely cause mitochondrial energy problem so it depends I think on each individual and what system in their body is slightly weak or prone to collapsing first so in other words if you have let's say you eat too much sugar drink too much alcohol and don't get enough sleep that could affect your hormonal system primarily or your brain primarily or your mitochondrial energy primarily and that's why we have to do the labs because you can't tell just because someone's tired or overweight which of these different systems has been damaged the most and from that determinate determine you know what system do you want to correct initially okay and so that's where the testing comes in to test you know fatigue is a big broad term and that's why when you look at like symptoms of fatigue on a WebMD you're like going through everything from scraped your knee and you need to recover because your body's in flames too like I think I'm pregnant and it's just everything on there so what you're saying is I test to identify which one of the three it is and start doing protocols around that yeah and usually one will stand out you know in my my doctor training program yesterday morning we had a perfect example this where we tested the adrenals and they were actually okay and you're thinking well that's strange this person is so tired and then we looked at the mitochondrial energy markers and on these labs there's like fourteen of these markers that relate to this 11 of them were damaged so I mean was just like a blood bath on the energy side and the adrenals were fine so that was a pretty easy determination to realize this is a myocardial energy it's not about the adrenal glands so with the mitochondrial energy that's a fascinating subject and we had Terry walls on here talking about the walls protocol and upgrading your mitochondria but but set it up for people at home who this is their first time hearing about mitochondria kind of give us an overview of what they are and what they do yeah it's a strange strange history right because mitochondria originally were bacteria that were outside of our bodies they're only inherited from the mother's side even stranger to all your mitochondria are a hundred percent related to your mom you have no mitochondrial DNA from your dad and eventually over time the human body or I should say animals in general this goes way way back obviously we're rather than allowing these independent bacteria to operate on their own kind of co-opt them and brought them into the cells and you know now we have what's called a mitochondria but that's their original origins if you trace it back gazillions of years so they're really unique structures and the easiest way to think about it it's just like with an automobile that has an engine you know they're the engine of the cell they're fueling the cell they're using carbs proteins and fat to create energy inside the cell and if they're working everything's running well and you can detox you can think you can run up and down the stairs you can do things and if the mitochondria become damaged then you start to get collapse of all kinds of different body systems for example mitochondria run liver detox capacity so you could get toxic because your mitochondria are working well of course they control our sense of physical energy so you see this a lot with athletes that they burn out their mitochondria they just you know exerting so much that they become fatigued because of that and then you can see it happening it could even be like related to diet and whatnot so the mitochondria are very delicate structures given their job and they're very easily damaged I'm curious then what are some more things that happen when a mitochondria is not functioning fully like how do they get messed up you mentioned athlete's burning themselves out or diet what are some common ways you see in your practice that this happens yeah the bigger picture that is you know you can imagine this structure it's a physical structure I mean it's tiny what's inside yourself I think about it like like you've ever see Star Wars or Star Trek they're always there's always a scene in the movie where there's a ship that you have to blow up and they have to shoot a bunch of missiles into it eventually it blows up right so they might mitochondria's like that it's like a spaceship but tiny and it's floating around in your cell and the missiles that could potentially hit it are called free radicals okay and that the term that we use for free radicals is called oxidative stress so if you have a lot of oxidative stress you have a lot of free radicals and think of free radicals is like a spark that's getting thrown out of a fire or something like that and so these sparks or missiles hit the very delicate mitochondria and destroy it or damage it and so the more oxidative stress you have or the more free radicals you have the more potential mitochondrial energy problems you're going to end up with and we get oxidative stress from all kinds of different things the process of oxidation is like when you cut an apple in half and starts to turn brown right it's something that's basically being destroyed and so oxidation can happen because you're toxic because you have a parasitic infection if you're stressed enough emotionally stressed enough you can start to get a lot of oxidative stress and so and how do we prevent oxidative stress basically people use antioxidants to act as a shield or like a protective layer around the spaceship to prevent free radicals from getting in and hitting it so antioxidants are our defense system our protection against this damage that can occur and we get our antioxidants from food basically okay so it sounds like the free radicals are the the first mover of this cascade of how mitochondria's get messed up I don't know better yes yes exactly so we need to focus on the free radicals and if we do add antioxidants or free radicals or whatever then the mitochondria's theoretically should be functioning at full capacity correct so the more either you can protect them with the antioxidants or you can reduce the free radical damage by things like you know detoxifying clearing up your gut all that kind of stuff okay what but antioxidants primarily are in from plants this is where we get them you can get you can buy them in a supple not red wine yeah oh my god it's a slippery one red wine has a lot of antioxidants and if you live in France I'm sure that works really well yeah it doesn't work outside of France oh and no one can understand why huh interesting so okay going so it sounds like we have two things we have the what you mentioned we have reducing the free radical load and boosting the antioxidant road in your opinion well saying we need to do both but what one is easier to do or we need to focus more on well one is cheap and probably more effective which is getting a lot of antioxidants from your food okay so this simply means eating a wide variety of vegetables with every meal breakfast lunch and dinner veggies not just vegetables you can add other things but every meal that you have should have some vegetables and if you can't deal with vegetables in the morning just repulse you for some reason you can have some fruit that has a lot of antioxidants like melon or blueberries or something like that but veggies are better veggies with every meal basically that's where the antioxidants come from right the plants grow antioxidants to protect themselves from oxidative stress I mean think about if your plant your outside pretty much all the time exposed to the ionizing radiation of the Sun and so plants develop pigments which we see as colors and those pigments are the actual physical antioxidants they're not making these antioxidants to help us out they're trying to survive their own little battle against the Sun and all we have to do is come along grab the plant kill it eat it and we get all that antioxidant protection that it grew that's fascinating yeah yeah it's really cool and that's why they say you know eat a wide range of colors the color diet or where you're supposed to be eating colors with every meal have you heard anything about like phytonutrients is that what they're called the yeah that would be a spin-off of phytonutrients yeah okay because I know phytonutrients are getting a lot of research because there's a lot of things we don't even know about what certain phytonutrients do or we're still discovering them oh absolutely I mean we have a general sense of these vitamins and minerals but there's more elements in the plants that we don't know most likely than the ones that we understand yeah so going back to the antioxidant free radical thing focusing on this so we can get our mitochondria up regulated so we can ultimately have more energy can you see this from from like a test if you're testing for free radicals or mitochondria function are there tests out there that can tell us either you have too many free radicals or not enough in our oxidants or what how do you figure that out yeah so this is why I'm so excited about the subject because there's a lab test I've been running these for 25 years but in all honesty I just started to understand them because they're pretty complicated and it's called an organic acids profile it's done from a urine sample and most alternative integrative doctors have heard of these but not too many know how to interpret them because they're really complicated basically it takes years to understand but simply put you can measure antioxidant levels what we call oxidative stress very accurately with this test so you can see does the person have adequate defense and protection for the mitochondria or not and if they don't then of course we recommend diet changes with more antioxidants along with supplements as appropriate and then the same organic acids profiles measure the sources of free radicals which are generally from two main areas one is that they come from digestive problems and the other is eight that come from some kind of toxin or toxin exposure that's usually more connected to the liver so either digestive problems and your gut or toxins heavy metals chemicals etc in the liver and this test is able to measure both gut function and the microbiome in the gut looking at bacteria and yeast overgrowth through the urine sample as well as looking at liver detox pathways to let you know if the person is toxic or not yeah it sounds really complicated yeah you know it's funny the way that the lab is taught usually is even more confusing and anyway it takes a long time to figure this out let me put it that way this is why is why I have a doctoral training program because you could stumble around for 20-25 years and try to put this together you're still your self or you know yes you can take a class yeah it's like you get all the raw data but happy how do you analyze it that's another skill exactly so with I know last time the call you were talking about how the kidneys Mirim what's going on in the brain and not to get too far removed from the mitochondria free radical topic we're talking about now but does that tie into it at all with what we're talking about with like urine analysis tests and and whatnot well that's it's related so think about this way when we say oxidative stress or free radicals you could actually just substitute the term inflammation right there okay because that's what oxidative stress causes it causes an inflammatory process and and the problem is again in functional medicine everything causes everything because inflammation also leads to oxidative stress where these two things are connected so when you have a lot of oxidative stress or tissue damage your brain is going to be impacted as profoundly as any other part of the body and what we know now kind of apropos of what you're asking is that when were inflamed chronically the body makes these things called cytokines and they're our way of trying to deal with the inflammation and those cytokines are actually produced from the exact same amino acids that we make our brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine from so if you imagine you have a thousand units of tyrosine in the body yeah and you could make a thousand units of dopamine so you can think well and be clearer in your thoughts and be happy basically not anxious but if you're inflamed those thousand units of tyrosine are gonna go towards cytokine production and you'll have a decrease in your ability to make dopamine so there's a direct connection between the brain and inflammation or the brain and oxidative stress that's really cool how you explained it so the cytokines require the same amino acids that our brain fuel good chemicals or neurotransmitters require and so when we're more inflamed we need more cytokines and so they essentially suck the energy they siphon the amino acids away from our fuel good chemicals and deal with the inflammation because that's a more pressing issue exactly and this is not a design flaw this is a brilliant design in that like you just said if you're sick and inflamed you don't feel great your body's got a amount of resources so it's gonna take those amino acids and use them to deal with the inflammation and oxidative stress problems and figure hey will generate some brain chemicals later on but for now I'm gonna leave this person anxious depressed craving food tired all the time and that's okay because we got something more urgent to deal with and the kicker on all this is that the organic acids profile has three different markers that measure whether this cytokine / inflammatory brain depletion thing is happening or not you just see it on the lab it's incredible technology most people don't know about wow that's amazing that's really cool about the amino acids going to the cytokines that makes a lot of sense because if you have a hundred dollars and you fill up your tank gas with 40 of it well now you got 60 and if you buy your food okay now you got grocery bills so that's another 40 then you got to pay rent that's another and you have nothing left to go out and have a good time that's a terrible analogy but you know your baby's a perfect Knology because you're basically burning through your resources for survival stuff yeah and then you don't have yet so that's a perfect analogy and that's the thing is that this is the most disturbing thing to me I talk to patients everyday you know and the thing is you can't tell as a human being when this is happening you feel anxious depressed or tired all the time but there's no meter in there that goes oh your cytokines are up and so your brain chemicals are down that's why you feel so bad so people internalize this they think I'm depressed or I'm just tired all the time or I'm anxious and they I don't know if they blame themselves but they feel like it's a they don't understand it's just a biochemical imbalance that's that can be fixed I mean that does that to me it's a tragedy and all this yeah yeah that's amazing so if the first step is testing let's just say they go through the tests and this is the issue they know for sure this is the problem of why maybe they're depressed or they're mitochondria's or dysregulated or anything what are some of the steps you recommend to cure this so basically we always start with lifestyle changes first because there's no point in somebody taking a ton of antioxidant supplements if they're not eating vegetables with every meal right so while we start with lifestyle distressing people getting them to meditate exercise eat well get to bed on time all that kind of stuff there has to be the foundation because you don't want to supplement somebody and make them feel better if they're not willing to you know change their lifestyle which is really at the root of all these problems anyways right and then we start to look at the lab-based factors like are they toxic and can't do we have to detoxify the person get the toxins out do they have a microbiome imbalance though is their gut full of bad bacteria and yeast organisms which we see on the same test we need to flush out those bad bugs put the good ones back in so we try to combine the lifestyle changes with the lab based treatments but basically it boils down to on the lab side three big variables which is handling stress fixing the gut and getting all the toxins and detox systems working properly okay and so with kind of like the lifestyle changes let's say someone's going to bed on time they're reducing their stress they're doing all that what are kind of some may be fun hacks so to speak that they can add into their lifestyle to either prevent or reduce this inflammation or upregulate to mitochondria anything that you recommend that comes to mind oh absolutely you know there's a book a really great book called the Blue Zones and it's a it's actually more than just a book um it's a book but it's a whole project at the National Geographic put together where they put together this research team to find where in the world people live to be over a hundred years of age and we're still fit and happening and healthy and one of the commonalities of course these people all had good community interactions and had really clean diets almost kind of stuff but one of the commonalities that I noticed is that each one of these communities that live so long and did so well had a intuitive way they built into their eating and herb taking structure that they really focused on anti-inflammatories hmm so you can do this with turmeric or curcumin you can do this the sardinia and the people that live in sardinia they do it with his herb called mastica there's many different ways that you can take plants in that have a really strong anti-inflammatory effect probably the safest I would say probably the most well studied and safest would be tumeric or its derivatives like curcumin where and you can obviously you can do tumeric every day and your food or you can take it in a pillow form and that acts as a really potent anti-inflammatory and as antioxidant properties as well and basically it's a spice right it's not um addictive or dangerous or turmeric has never hurt anyone you know it's a completely safe thing to do it so I think when people are doing home treatments and they're not being monitored by a doctor it's really good to stick with things that are time-tested that you know aren't gonna cause a problem and not to go off the reservation and high dose yourself on a bunch of iodine or something that you know could be you know potentially dangerous like last time you're on the show we're talking about the 5htp tyrosine tradeoff and that someone here in this show it could be dangerous if they go out and say okay guys start taking 3,000 milligrams of tyrosine because then that could throw off other things and it's always that trade-off or someone hears about copper magnesium and zinc and they take one of them and it throws the others off so what I'm hearing with you is that some of these whole foods or spices or herbs like tumor coach-house curcumin in it is a safer way to do this because it's got the complete package built in exactly you can never go wrong and in fact a lot of these complete packages as you said are really powerful it's nothing they're not powerful it's just said they're powerful and safe yeah I know curcumin I was researching it the active ingredient tumeric has like some of the most backed scientific clinical studies in cancer prevention and all these other it's one of the most studied herbs out there that curcumin is the active ingredient in tumeric right that's correct yeah and you can buy it so like a lot of the supplement companies now make it in like a kind of super concentrated activated form so rather than doing spoonfuls of tumeric every day shirt yeah you're taking a little capsule basically it's more realistic oh cool cool and do you have a favorite supplement that you use or recommend the people out there with turmeric or curcumin well I think any of the top company lines are good you know the ones that are sell through physicians typically there's designs for health as my favorite foreign research is good Douglas labs orthomolecular is a well-known one metagenic is a good company you know there's a good dozen companies that sell through physicians that tend to have tend to have but just very strictly maintain super high quality standards and I think if you're sticking with those brands you're in good shape okay so how much would you do if you're trying to up regulate your mitochondria or just reduce inflammation what would you recommend well I mean you want to start with the dietary factors that we talked about and if you want to be kind of extra careful in the antioxidants and you don't want to take a ton of supplements you can also go for vegetable juicing I mean that's a time-tested and safe and great way to get tons of antioxidants so I mean an I do vegetable juicing frequently go to the farmers market I mean you can get a lot of vegetables in two glass of juice that are you know such a large volume you'd never be able to actually eat them you know that amount whether it's beets or carrots or the grief you lean back green leafy vegetables all that kind of stuff so that's a really great way to set almost kind of like a multivitamin but in a liquid right from the farmers market you know if you want to really crank your antioxidants up and then and like you mentioned earlier there's these phyto there's things that are happening that we don't understand yet right so if you try to just reduce it to supplements I think you're getting part of the story but if you're using Whole Foods and you're juicing them for example of vegetable juice you're getting every single nutrient including the bulk of the ones that we don't really understand yet exactly how they exist or work so I think that's why that technique is probably a superior it's hard though to sell like eat your vegetables it's not as sexy as like hey we got a formulated crafted supplement blend that's gonna up regulate mitochondria and that's maybe why supplements are billion-dollar growing industry I mean I sell a lot of supplements right that is a big part of my business I'm not against doing that but I I won't sell supplements to someone unless they're willing to make the lifestyle changes too because otherwise you just get addicted to the supplement effect I mean these things really work is not a joke like tumeric I'll take your inflammation down and make your joint pain go away that's not a joke but if you're doing that and you're having you know chocolate chip cookies every night by the bag what's the point I mean that's not really us doing a patient a service you know sure sure so with with tumeric curcumin and the vegetable juice we talked about what others are your go-to for reducing inflammation you got any other haxor yeah I'm thinking on a super safe side vitamin C you know vitamin C with bioflavonoids pretty pretty inexpensive it's not particularly complicated to take if you take too much of it you're getting a bit of loose stool and diarrhea and you just back off and it's water-soluble you know it's it's pretty much it's not exactly completely risk-free but very low risk and easy to get your hands on so vitamin C is a big one how would someone go about adding that into their diet well you can take vitamin C I think safely anywhere from 2,000 milligrams a day up to as much if you're very stressed as much as 5,000 milligrams a day max okay and that's that's additional to your proper nutrition diet lifestyle exactly yeah and that's a really powerful antioxidant time-tested again I mentioned the old Linus Pauling so the grandfather of vitamin C research but um it's definitely a good way to go okay and loose stools what they should look for if they're taking too much exactly yeah and make sure that you get vitamin C with bioflavonoids you don't want to get it by itself okay another thing I want to bring up I've been asking all my guests about this and I'm curious to know your thoughts so if my audience is is burned out with this I guess I'll have to listen to another rant on it but saunas infrared saunas or just saunas in general I know they've gotten a lot of buzz now about detoxing one of my favorite things to do is sit in the sauna what are your thoughts on incorporating those well you know we know from all the latest research that everyone in the United is toxic you know the average American adult has somewhere between depending on what studies you read 122 to as many as you know six seven hundred toxins in their system at any one time and these some some of these are neurotoxins some of these are and are endocrine disruptors so they're basically messing up your brain and messing up your hormones and they cause cancer heart to be heart disease diabetes everything everything bad happens when you're toxic let alone what's going on in your brain and your mitochondria right it's MIT one of the major reasons why mitochondria are so damaged and we're so tired is because of our toxin exposure every baby born in the United States now has 50 to 70 toxins the day it's born okay so this is everybody this is not like I worked in a coal plant and or I was a biochemistry major and was in to the lab every day this is like every human being that has a mattress drives a car breeze and eats is toxic so you just yeah it's completely unavoidable it's getting worse every year and that's just something we have to deal with so there's three exit routes for toxins you can sweat them out you can dump them out in the stool and you can dump them out in the urine so the number one thing to get rid of water soluble toxins is just to make sure that you're very well hydrated in drinking a lot of water okay you know that that's like basic if you're not doing that you might as well just jump off a bridge okay because you're gonna be dead from toxin exposure at some point if you don't drink enough water and and three water recommendation how much would someone be drinking I mean depends on how healthy you want to be you know I drink at least three or four quarts a day I weigh about 155 160 is that about half your body weight in ounces of water a day yeah somewhere in that ballpark you know you don't have to drink that much every single day but somewhere around half that's the two general parameters you can do half your body weight in ounces per day or at least you have to do is one completely clear urination a day mm-hmm where the your urine looks like water and there's no yellow in it so you're clearing out everything there's a to two different ways you can kind of look at read a piece of paper under it I've heard yeah exactly okay so very few people are well or well hydrated in my experience so that's number one and number two is you can they come out in a stool right so good bowel movement it's plenty of fiber vegetables a lot of kind of stuff make sure you've gots working well and then the third exit route is through the skin through sweat and it's incredibly effective way to get toxins out and I'm think there have been sweat lodges and people have had this idea of putting themselves in hot environments to sweat it out for I don't know at least 5,000 years that I know of I was at an Ayurvedic Ayurvedic healing center a couple years ago and that was one of the the things that they did there I mean that's 5000 year old medicine right there's not a new idea and so for now for us where you imagine how many toxins were in the environment 5000 years ago versus today with tens of thousands of chemicals that we're all exposed to you know saunas and sweating hydration and good digestion is just you know survival skills at this point in our culture great way to break it down have you seen anyone do like skin brushes or even Gua Sha I know they have it's it's it's it's is Gua Sha where they used like a bullhead spoon and they rub oil on them and then they like pull out the actual toxin kind of like they're squeezing their skin and you can I saw this guy dr. Kassar doing it on YouTube and he had this towel that was white and then by the end of it it was like brown yeah I'm not sure of the name of it but when I was at the Ayurvedic place they did the oil pulling and then they did the oil massages to where they get three guys in a room like three big guys in the room and they have like literally gallons of oil that they're rubbing into your skin and they're basically trying to create a gradient where they're putting in they're trying to fly this is brilliant they're trying to flush out fat soluble toxins I'm using by using oil and it was intense it was a wonderful experience so again this stuff has been around for thousands of years it's just now I think it's going from like luxury to like requirement for survival that's fascinating about the oil pulling because I've heard of that in your mouth with Ayurvedic medicine and that your veins capillaries and your under your tongue sublingually you can that's two ways so you can put things in and you can pull things out and that's been used but I've never heard of it on like a body or a skin just yeah we did these every day treatments in the morning and treatments in the afternoon and we did the oil massages pretty much every day it's an incredible experience now there's one other thing that I should mention cuz this ties back to we're talking about earlier which is that you have fat soluble toxins and water soluble toxins in the body the water soluble ones not a big deal I mean they are a big deal but you can pee them out if you're drinking enough water the fat soluble ones that we're talking about now that the Ayurvedic doctors figured out how to try to get rid of have to be broken down and made water soluble before you can excrete them in order to break them down you have to run what we call phase one which is a cytochrome p450 pathway and Phase two on these toxins so you can flush them out and to run phase one and Phase two you need to have antioxidants B vitamins and the last and very very important element as the sulfur containing compounds like an acetylcysteine taurima thiamine these sulfur containing amino acids so that's what's required to bind up and get rid of fat soluble toxins and you don't have those nutrients and they're not they're just gonna stay and your tissue and build up okay personal question I was talking to wendy meyers she was talking about heavy metal detoxification and how that can cause a lot of brain fog and a lot of mental issues and she recommends two things I was wondering if you've heard of him she recommended bio SIL it's a it's like a they sell out whole foods the liquid form I think it's a silicone collagen generator and pectus all C which is a modified pectin starch do you know anything about either of those I don't use those two exact products in my practice but they're very similar products that I use the idea with detox is that you want to grab the toxin if it's fat soluble you got to turn it into something that's water soluble and then you got to dump it out of the tissue and then if it's going to be dumped out through the sweat or the urine that's relatively easy to dump it out through this stool which is where a lot of these toxins come out you have to bind it up in the digestive tract so that it exits and doesn't get reabsorbed so that's why you need fiber okay right as a binding agent and there's other things that people use it a little more complicated but it could be like it pectin fiber or something like that that's going to allow the toxin to adhere to that object so that it gets pulled out in the stool otherwise the toxin could get into the gut and then get reabsorbed and circulate back into your body you want to avoid that so that's what the pectin pectus all see is it's like a fiber that's gonna to bind it's a binding agent okay some kind of binding agent and then have you heard of bio SIL that I've heard of it I don't use it in my practice because I went in and bought it at the Whole Foods and the lady was like raving about it she's a cow it's a miracle everyone's using it yeah I don't know maybe it's a the new the new fad supplement there's a lot of ways to do this and there's definitely trends that come and go every five years now sure sure yeah tastes awful by the way but dr. kaylis we're coming up on time here a couple questions that I wrap things up with guests and and get their opinion on first one is something you learned over the past year that you didn't know what's been the biggest lesson that's a really good question what's the biggest lesson that would help other people it's what we I would say yeah I would say the role of you have two things that are kind of combined one is grief and then the other is meditation you know so the role of grief by that I mean how grief affects human beings and how it affects our health you know it's very one of the most toxic and devastating things to human health I think is the grieving process if we don't go through it properly and then I think one of the ways that we can resolve that is through our spiritual understanding and meditation and if you don't have a really spiritually grounded sense of yourself then when someone around you dies it's very easy to get thrown off and to start to get sick and we see a large number of patients that come through my training program and the doctors that we work with whose initial health problem happened around a period of loss and grief divorce death death or something like that yeah that's fascinating this man I love that question because nine times out of ten it's always has nothing to do with like what we talked about for the first five minutes and it's great it's like curve ball okay so so another one then you're talking to Dan Kalish in his 20s just start life just getting out into the real world what advice would you give Dan and Kahless the 20 year old that's a good idea I would say number one focus on human beings don't worry about money or career or your future or how things are gonna go and then if you build relationships and you focus on the people around you and taking care of yourself and being pretty physically healthy that everything just works out and that the bottom line in all of this I believe is I believe I kind of knew this when I was 18 years old I went to a Zen monastery in Japan when I was 22 I went to a Thai Buddhist monastery I kind of knew this in my teens and 20s but I really get it now which is that the real life that we lead is a spiritual life and that the things happening around us like you're gonna buy a house you're gonna get married you're gonna you know you're gonna get a job or get fired from a job all that it's not happening in the spiritual world but it seems real but the real reality is the spiritual reality and that's where I attempt to live now full-time hmm fascinating answer killing it I'm curious on this one then in that whole desert island game you got five things to bring to a desert island but I'm curious what would your one book be that you brought with you if you could oh that's it the Dao de Jing yeah hey okay look I read without the Dao de Jing by Lao su I read that every day eighty-one verses pretty much everything you need to know in that book yeah awesome and then the last thing what have you changed your mind on since you started a functional medicine diet is probably the biggest one you know how so absolutely absolutely because you know I'm I've been around for 25 30 years you know so I've I was here pre paleo so I when I came on to seeing gluten-free was just starting it was the low-fat thing was just kind of coming to an end and then we got into metabolic typing in the zone diet and then people discovered fat is healthy and then people discovered protein is healthy and then people discovered meat is actually not bad and maybe grains we should think about you know and then go to like these Ayurvedic doctors and you might end up with a vegan diet you know with zero animal products at all zero zero zero animal products no animal fat whatsoever and so I think I've probably changed my diet my mind on diet like six or eight times and now I realize that you know it's probably a reason why no one can really agree on this you know because it really just depends and there is no clear way to eat and even for myself like how I've eaten that's made me the healthiest is varied at different times of my life and I have to eat quite a bit differently today than I did in my 20s or 30s in order to be super healthy dr. kaylis thank you so much for coming on the show that's our that's our time it would if flew by I mean phenomenal phenomenal show as always Kalish wellness is the best place to find you is that it yeah Kalish wellness.com okay and then your book the keyless method is that still your most recent book that people can pick up yeah the Kalish method and I wrote another book recently but it's more for doctors who are building their practices so it's probably only of interest to the what are Tichenor is out there that's a five pillars to building a successful functional medicine practice so any practitioners be happy to send them a free copy of that book we have that online we can send them a PDF cool all right dr.
kaylis thank you so much for coming on you're welcome back anytime appreciate your time thanks dr. dam Kalish everybody phenomenal show definitely ranks in my top five this year so far of 2016 I don't say that because the other ones aren't aren't good it's like choosing from children yours hear me say that but some resonate with where you're at more and I think I've been very open that I've had brain fog and been trying to fix it and gotten so much better just to go in strict low carb you know we're talking under fifty grams a day low carb for the past couple weeks slipped up here and there a few times but that's made a tremendous difference that and getting eight hours of sleep I got a Fitbit charge HR the one that tracks your sleep your steps and your heart rate I think it was like 150 bucks got one for my girlfriend for her birthday too I loved it so much and this thing guys has been amazing I don't know if you have one whatever what you have or some sort of tracker but I was using my phone for a year and I liked having all that data but I was ready to take it up a notch and so I got the Fitbit charge HR and seeing your sleep is so so so important it tracks your restlessness the time taken to fall asleep post sleep and it keeps you really honest when you have all this data in front of you oh I'm only getting three thousand steps today not ten I mean that's time to step it up or ro I'm actually I think I'm getting eight hours but I'm sitting there checking my phone for thirty minutes before I go to bed or whatever we're doing and I don't go to bed and then when I do I'm less I'm more Restless so I actually get six hours of sleep so knowing this information and giving it some sort of quantification is a really cool way I've found in the last month or two to improve my health anyway off the soapbox you know I go in my soapbox rants this week's review if you want to get on this just head over to our iTunes page leave us a rating and a review takes three seconds helps a lot and you get featured on the cool segments like this let's go to Bethany Lynne thank you for your review Bethany says my daily mute podcast favorite so happy commute Bethany I hope hope works going well thanks for your view let me read it I've been a part of the paleo community for five years and a followed paleohacks website but only recently discovered the podcast Clarke is a wonderful host yes great insightful questions is also just all-around fun to listen to as well as being very well-spoken himself why Thank You Bethany yes I am I love the variety of guests I have learned so many new things and life advice and health hacks it's very inspirational podcast and I like that it includes many perspectives and guests from all areas in the health field and community I feel like my own quality of life has been improved by listening to all the great life coaching and ideas from the guests in this podcast keep up the great work Bethany thank you so much for that kind thoughtful well-written review really means a lot again happy commute and I'll say this I say this every episode but the shows not about me or my hosting skills about the guests and it's about you guys it's about getting the information from the guests who have years of experience and knowledge like Dan Kalish and thousands of people he's practiced on and finding out how we can apply it in our lives for free on the show that's the mission alright so if you want to support the show the best way to do that probably is to go over to the iTunes page leave a rating and a review really helps us out so thanks for that that's it for this week's show we'll see you next week before we go archives at peeler hacks com best place to go check out the recipes make sure you like the Facebook page get the updates from that a really good place to go if you want to get a hold of me Clark at Clark danger calm if you go over there I have the eleven questions change your life free ebook these are the best eleven questions I've ever asked myself or the people I work with and I've compiled them into a short quick free little workbook I like same workbook does that sound too harsh guide that you can ask yourself so that's over there at Clark danger calm all right that's it we'll see you next week thanks so much .
Video Description:
For more Paleohacks Podcast episodes, make sure to check out
Weight gain, fatigue, depression, female hormone and digestive problems—what do these five common health complaints all have in common? Find out on today’s show, where Dr. Dan Kalish—Functional Medicine practitioner and founder of The Kalish method—simplifies complex, scientific health topics with actionable tips you can apply to your own life.
Discover the easiest ways to boost your antioxidants and combat oxidative stress, from vegetable juicing to curcumin—the active ingredient in turmeric—supplements. Find out about Functional Medicine lab testing and whether it’s right for you. Finally, learn more about detoxing, and why simple water, fiber and Vitamin C can do a world of wonder for your health.
3:30: How did The Kalish Method come to be?
5:30: The top five health complaints you need to know about.
7:30: “Test, don’t guess:” The real benefits of Functional Medicine lab work.
9:30: Why are you so tired? Hormones, the brain and mitochondrial energy.
13:00: What is mitochondrial energy?
17:30: Antioxidants: The cheapest way to treat oxidative stress.
20:00: Can you measure oxidative stress?
26:00: “There’s no point in taking antioxidant supplements if they’re not eating their vegetables:” The importance of lifestyle changes.
30:00: “Powerful and safe:” the benefits of curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric.
31:00: Vegetable juicing: “A liquid multivitamin you can get from the farmer’s market.”
33:30: Why you should get more Vitamin C in your diet.
35:00: Hydration and toxins: The surprising link.
40:00: Can fiber help you detox?
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