00:03:49.300So how do you, I guess we could start with that.
00:03:51.320How do you test mitochondrial function?
00:03:55.160Well, our interest is not in testing whether it's good or bad so much as it is in testing
00:04:00.360what can we learn about it that would give you something actionable and also unique so if we
00:04:08.660tested everyone uh who's in this town um and we're telling everyone the same thing or we're telling
00:04:14.960half of the people one thing and half the people something up something else not really worth it
00:04:19.300but if we can find you know each person one in a hundred type of advice that's unique to them i
00:04:25.980think that's worth doing a test for so we're focused on that and the reason we can do that
00:04:31.680is that although the mitochondria has at broad scope the fundamental problem of how to convert
00:04:40.360your food that you're eating into energy using by the way the oxygen that you that you breathe
00:04:45.640to do that there are specific engines that have specific requirements and you can break that
00:04:52.920process down into different things that you can measure. And that has nutritional implications
00:04:58.780because some of those things run on certain vitamins and some of those things run on others.
00:05:03.660And if you look at the mitochondrial cocktails and supplements that people are taking, say you're
00:05:08.180taking CoQ10, CoQ10 has a very specific role in that chain of reactions. And so measuring the
00:05:15.300performance of those things around there can actually tell you something about whether there's
00:05:19.300something unique about your needs for CoQ10 and so on. Cool. Okay. I didn't even know you were
00:05:25.860able to measure that. So that's very interesting. Yeah. Okay. So I think part of what brought me to
00:05:32.380mitochondrial dysfunction is we had a transformative experience going on an all meat diet.
00:05:39.440And that was very out there. It's slightly less out there now, but it like completely changed my
00:05:45.480dad and my mom, but, and my health, like dramatically. And then slowly research is
00:05:52.480coming out being like, okay, maybe this is because you're in ketosis. Like who knows what other
00:05:56.660factors are going on? Um, but at least there's some research being done now. But so that brought
00:06:01.260me to the, to the nutrition side that completely changed my life. And then I got sick again when
00:06:05.480I went to Miami and it was from black mold or, or just mold in general in my Miami house.
00:06:10.800And I got a whole bunch of the symptoms that diet had originally fixed back, even though I hadn't changed my diet. And I was like, that's odd that it would kind of manifest in the same way as my food reactions. And I guess maybe the underlying factor was they both impact mitochondria. And that's what you say, right? Is that there's a whole bunch of things out there that can negatively impact your mitochondria and you get this weird array of symptoms because of that.
00:06:40.800Yeah, that's absolutely true. So my familiarity with your story is basically what you've talked about on YouTube and what you've written up on your website.
00:06:50.740And I think it seems like the key turning points are inflammatory disease in your youth, going on Enbrel and methotrexate, developing mental problems the next year, eight years old, and then going on SSRIs to treat that, having diet fix that.
00:07:14.280then going off the SSRIs, having that lead to its own catastrophe. And that's where you and
00:07:20.280your father's story kind of share similarity. And then this red meat carbohydrate are big
00:07:26.220turning points in the mold toxins and the cholesterome in the treatment, right? So
00:07:30.040when I look at that, I see some common threads that all relate to mitochondrial function. So
00:07:35.800So first of all, in people, so Enbrel is one of numerous, they call them biologics, that
00:07:44.620are drugs that are effectively blocking the function of an inflammatory mediator called
00:10:44.420And I said to myself, I'm not sick anymore, but I still have a cough.
00:10:49.840I must not be resolving the inflammation.
00:10:52.120So I went and did a lot of research, went down rabbit holes on what causes T cells,
00:10:59.420which are inflammatory cells involved in the inflammatory response to not go from the activated
00:11:05.100pro-inflammatory state to the clean up this mess and resolve it state. And T-cells in their active
00:11:12.980inflammatory state run for fuel on carbohydrate and glutamine. And you can't really control how
00:11:20.080much glutamine is in your system without causing other problems, but you can certainly control the
00:11:25.340amount of carbohydrate. So this lion diet, to me, is you're taking away the carbohydrate that
00:11:34.100for some other reason, the T cells just won't stop activating, right? You take away the
00:11:41.220carbohydrate, they calm down. You go on this very carnitine-rich diet. The only way you can get
00:11:47.480meaningful amounts of carnitine with diet alone is to mostly eat red meat. And now you're solving
00:11:53.340this problem that's going way back into childhood oh wow which is to stop this inflammatory demand
00:12:01.440for the carnitine by just easing up on on it by supplying it you're starting your own college
00:12:06.900yeah well it's well started the progressives hope for universal education at something approximating
00:12:12.400zero cost that's what we've got we can bring you the best lectures that you'll be able to get
00:12:16.820anywhere in terms of their quality of content and also the production values all the people
00:12:21.580we're bringing on board are existential philosophers in some real sense. We think
00:12:25.980that a humanities education should enrich your experience in every direction and be nothing
00:12:32.320but positive. Well, except also difficult and challenging, but that's also positive.
00:12:37.320Yeah, we certainly didn't have that when I was a kid.
00:12:45.820I've gone down rabbit holes about like, ketogenic diet didn't work for me. It wasn't good enough.
00:12:51.240i was still having inflammatory responses so i was like okay it can't just be ketosis that's like
00:12:56.420helping me right now it's the elimination of everything else that's a contributing factor
00:13:01.100and i've had so many different theories about what that is whether it's leaky gut and i'm
00:13:06.040reacting to plant proteins that shouldn't be in my blood like something as simple as that
00:13:09.820and then recently so it's been over 10 years since i stopped taking ssris which was i think
00:13:16.580those were so detrimental to my health compared to everything else that I was on compared to the
00:13:21.880mold exposure compared to everything that I think maybe is part of the reason I'm still not really
00:13:27.080able to eat other things but I started reintroducing other things and I my reactions are much less
00:13:31.480but I still feel best just eating meat which seems like something's still up and then the other thing
00:13:37.560and this has hit my dad really hard and I think SSRIs and then his withdrawal was treated with
00:13:43.840clonazepam that just neurologically injured him um which has its own mitochondrial thread
00:13:50.600yeah i want to get into that too the difference between ssris and benzodiazepines but um we have
00:13:57.240an extremely difficult time with most supplements especially vitamins so generally you go to a
00:14:03.380doctor and even if it's a very good integrative doctor they'll be like okay well make sure you're
00:14:08.380getting certain b vitamins and certain supplements like you talked about coq10 right um and we
00:14:16.180haven't really found any that don't cause like excess energy agitation and then when i started
00:14:22.080looking into mitochondrial dysfunction i was like does that mean is that a symptom too like an
00:14:27.760inability to tolerate things that should be helpful yes um and i think that i think there
00:14:35.960are a lot of idiosyncratic reasons why one person might not tolerate specific supplements
00:14:41.500and another person might tolerate others. But it sounds like you don't tolerate any,
00:14:48.520which is interesting. I can take folinic acid, but no other form of B vitamin really at all.
00:14:53.840Yeah. I think your specific tolerance for folinic acid, I think, is probably a result
00:15:03.000of a secondary layer of sulfur toxicity and i think that could that could explain like
00:15:09.660intolerance and yeah and do you think that's from eating so much meat because that happened
00:15:16.800yeah the hot the red meat back so the red meat carbohydrate restricted background although it
00:15:22.780has plenty of benefits like we were just talking about um there are trade-offs and one of those
00:15:27.240trade-offs is you have a very high intake of sulfur amino acids. You have a very low intake
00:15:34.420of carbohydrate. Your body's going to make carbohydrate one way or another. And one of
00:15:38.840the ways to do that is to break down sulfur amino acids and make carbohydrates. So you're right
00:15:42.700there, you're predisposed to breaking down sulfur amino acids. Sulfur amino acids are very interwoven
00:15:49.260with the methylation process where these B vitamins come in, like flannic acid is the form
00:15:56.460of folate that's not related to methylation, methylfolate is the form that is related to
00:16:01.440methylation. When you have more methylation than you need, you break down the fundamental
00:16:08.120building block amino acids, which are sulfur amino acids. So you add, it's like pouring fuel
00:16:15.280on the fire if you're going to add methylfolate to a diet that's high in red meat and low in
00:16:22.520carbohydrate because now you've got two reasons to be breaking down those sulfur amino acids
00:16:26.080and when you get too much broken down sulfur you wind up having mitochondrial toxicity
00:16:32.640but you also have independent neurotoxicity going on as well and just neuro excitation so i think
00:16:40.620this you described a feeling of agitation or what do you mean by that restlessness yeah can't sleep
00:16:47.920it's um it's always if it's really bad it's like severe insomnia for a couple of days so this
00:16:55.240happened i was trying to test out different forms of b9 so i did methylfolate and then i did
00:17:00.920folic acid which i know people are moving away from but this was before i could get my hands
00:17:06.260on like folinic acid properly um but it seems to be almost every b vitamin maybe b1 is less bad
00:17:13.280but i still it's restless legs and i would say restless legs is the worst part and insomnia and
00:17:19.780with dad it's even worse but then my mom who's been on this diet the same almost the same length
00:17:25.580as me is totally fine has like none of that so we're in like my family's in this position where
00:17:32.100the diet helps can't really move it but there's obviously something going on and we couldn't
00:17:38.860figured out if it's methylation damage she was never on any psych meds yeah so it seems like
00:17:44.500you got some genes from your dad that are not ideal threads between the well it just seems like
00:17:50.120your dad and you share yeah like a lot aspects of your story that you don't with your mom so
00:17:54.780yeah um i think that was from we were both on ssris for like a decade yeah so i feel like some
00:18:01.460of it's that but you were both on ssris for a reason right oh yeah for severe crippling mental
00:18:07.360illness. Yes, it wasn't just for fun. So I'm saying like, yes, it's true that you and your
00:18:12.340dad share health history because you both went on SSRIs, but you also both went on SSRIs because
00:18:17.280you share health history, right? So anyway, I think it's possible that there are many explanations
00:18:24.960and it's possible that there's one. If I were to try to make this all fit into one explanation,
00:18:29.820I would say that these different B vitamins are all playing various roles in methylation and
00:18:35.440sulfur metabolism, those two things intersect. You know, when your sulfur metabolism is messed
00:18:42.620up, you're going to have more insomnia, you're going to have more anxiety, you're going to have
00:18:46.840more restlessness, restless legs. I think that's the simple explanation is these are interacting
00:18:52.680with those two systems in a way that's aggravating sulfur metabolism. And I think even though the
00:18:58.940red meat, low carb diet is helping you a lot in many ways. It's kind of a baseline predisposition
00:19:06.620to having those problems. And so I think that's the best explanation for that. And I do think
00:19:13.420that a lot of people who are intolerant to supplements could work on maybe work within
00:19:23.400the diet to try to to boost those nutrients up at a at a much lighter level because you might
00:19:30.220benefit from more of them but you might not need i was thinking hundreds of milligrams i was
00:19:35.000thinking it might be a dosing problem dad pointed out the b vitamin intolerance the before he was
00:19:40.000even on a ssri so this was like maybe 10 years before the diet he was he he just said i can't
00:19:46.400take b vitamins but that was about as deep we got into it so maybe that's methylation issues or
00:19:51.180mitochondrial something. Okay. Well, that's cool. Cause that's kind of where my research has brought
00:19:56.840me to was something's up with the sulfur part. You know, anyway, what do people do if they're
00:20:05.160stuck in a position where they're extremely sensitized to things or chronically ill and
00:20:10.880they're having a hard time treating themselves and think they think maybe it could be mitochondrial
00:20:15.380dysfunction? Like, how do you just start tapping into that treatment for that?
00:20:18.700Yeah, well, I, you know, I think there are different people have different amount of resources. And so there's different things that you can try on your own. And there's, there's, you know, you can achieve faster results with testing. But I think that for sure, like people who are supplement intolerant should just get out of the framework of like, I need to take this supplement, and should, you know, work on trying to look at their diet and analyze their micronutrients and get and gently lift up.
00:20:48.700those those nutrients through the diet because supplements are you know a lot of people don't
00:20:55.100have any problem with taking 10 times or 100 times what they need but some people do and the fact
00:21:01.260that you negatively reacted to 200 milligrams doesn't mean you don't need two more milligrams
00:21:05.340of a b vitamin in your diet so i think that can be very helpful um you know are the reason that i
00:21:12.780that i developed the mitochondrial testing product is because it can help shed a lot of
00:21:17.420light on stuff like this. I had one, and the worst part about it is there are these trends out there
00:21:25.240where people get really good results from mega dosing something. And then even clinicians pick
00:21:32.880it up as like they read the anecdotes, they hear the stories, and that becomes a treatment for that
00:21:38.740thing. And so one example is high dose thiamine, vitamin B1. And there's a lot of people who get
00:21:46.000miraculous results from taking 2000 milligrams a day, even though we're all getting like 1.3
00:21:51.800milligrams a day in our diet. So that's light years between those two things. And one of the
00:21:58.580people who used our mitochondrial test had a problem with fatigue. And that was her only
00:22:07.380problem at the time was her fatigue was 10 out of 10. So it was a problem, but she didn't have any
00:22:13.140other problems at that time. So her practitioner puts her on high-dose thiamine, about 1,000
00:22:20.120milligrams a day. And the fatigue does start getting better. But then she develops some kind
00:22:27.580of neuromuscular problem where she couldn't walk straight and she couldn't keep her balance.
00:22:33.560And she stayed on the thiamine for months while this was happening and getting worse before she
00:22:38.960realized she had to get off of it. And when we ran the mitochondrial testing on it, it basically
00:22:44.520said like, look, you have some blocks here. And if you funnel, if you just dump energy down that
00:22:52.300pathway, you're going to run into some trouble. And so she might've needed thiamin, but because
00:22:57.340that just unleashed energy in one pathway, dumping on something else that was blocked,
00:23:02.720that really caused a lot of mitochondrial stress for her. And cutting out the thiamin was very
00:23:07.720helpful. Gently raising the other B vitamins with foods that had all of them very slowly over time
00:23:15.680was very helpful. And the last piece of the puzzle for her was physical therapy too. I think even
00:23:22.580though nutrition is incredibly powerful in causing health or disease, if you've got a neuromuscular
00:23:30.320condition, you also need specific exercises to address that. Proper nutrition gives your body
00:23:36.760the power to respond to those exercises, but those exercises are what actually restore your
00:23:41.580balance or your neuromuscular function. And so I think testing can be extremely valuable when it
00:23:53.200comes to trying to address those things that are unique between people. But a general rule is if
00:24:00.320you don't react well to mega dosing, stop mega dosing. Yeah, for sure. Okay, interesting. So
00:24:06.440what do you recommend, um, for natural ways to increase your overall level of B vitamins?
00:24:14.620Um, the two big dietary factors are organ meats and nutritional yeast. Now nutritional yeast on
00:24:22.520the market has a lot of B vitamins added to it. Usually there are a couple of brands out there
00:24:28.960that are unfortified i only use unfortified nutritional yeast because uh because i why
00:24:37.200would i take like i don't i don't eat fortified foods because then i'm not eating a no i'm not
00:24:42.400getting my nutrients from food like the whole point of improving the quality of your foods
00:24:47.120is to get food nutrients not supplements right yeah so unfortified nutritional yeast i think
00:24:53.360is a great source of B vitamins it doesn't have all of them liver as an organ meat is like
00:24:59.680through the roof in almost all the B vitamins so if I had to pick one of those I'd do liver
00:25:06.080okay I have a question on this so one of the things I haven't strictly avoided I'll have
00:25:11.920liver sometimes but at the beginning of this like meat journey and trying to get healthier
00:25:17.560I couldn't handle liver yeah was that a B vitamin issue because I was like any part of the cow seems
00:25:22.860okay but liver is like something doesn't make me feel good in your case i think it's a b vitamin
00:25:28.300issue but there's but liver is you know if you're gonna overdose on anything from liver
00:25:33.900b vitamins vitamin a and copper are kind of the things that it's really really high in
00:25:39.340um and so anyone with a problem in any of those things can have a problem with liver
00:25:44.540in your case it just makes sense to pin it on the b vitamins because you've also tried the
00:25:48.780the isolated supplements, you know, and the fact that you tolerate folinic acid, not methylfolate
00:25:53.360gives a very super specific, like it, it makes it, it makes it overall not sound meaningless.
00:26:00.280Like I just, you know, every time I take something, I get sick. The fact that you have
00:26:06.080really specific, like I tolerate this form of folate and not that one, I think adds a lot of
00:26:12.700scientific plausibility to the idea that you've got b vitamin things going on so for you i would
00:26:19.380pin it on b vitamins well maybe i need is maybe it's a dosing problem too and i need to start
00:26:23.440with like one liver capsule i know that's for sure true and you know that person that i was
00:26:31.160talking about definitely had some like even with the foods had some some dosing things and i think
00:26:38.180that was you know i think it's i don't think it usually gets that far until you mess some other
00:26:44.000things up but yeah okay that's interesting well i think i knew we need to do this test
00:26:52.400we did like earlier this year we've been in touch with so many doctors for my dad this year and we
00:26:57.800ran a bunch of genetic screening because we're like how much of this is this weird b vitamin
00:27:01.960problem but he can't take any b vitamins without skyrocketing symptoms to like
00:27:07.720someone that looks like they should be in the hospital right with a little bit of a b vitamin
00:27:12.820it's like okay what what do we do there so we ran about we did sequencing.com i think and looked at
00:27:18.160the genome and ran that through some like third-party sites and there were there were
00:27:22.620some methylation problems here and some like comp problems or um but we haven't done that test that
00:27:28.700sounds maybe necessary at this point yeah well yeah we can we'll arrange that and i think that
00:27:37.020could shed a lot that could allow the sequencing to shed a lot more light than it has as well
00:27:42.820because um you know because if you find specific things wrong in the mitochondria they might have
00:27:47.940a genetic basis and those whole genome sequencing reports are like even if you are an expert you
00:27:53.820really can't just go inside the file and find what's important without having a structured way
00:28:01.420of digging for it i mean thank goodness for ai that's made it a lot easier but it's still a lot
00:28:05.880of data okay okay interesting well then let's go back to um can we touch on ssris and benzodiazepines
00:28:15.340a bit sure because it concerns me because um like a lot of dad's symptoms honestly they look like
00:28:20.620previous neurological damage that we kind of thought was resolved that's flared up for no
00:28:29.180reason like no there was no medication trigger he's very careful with his health other than
00:28:35.400doing a lot of work but other than that he's very careful and it's like why did all these
00:28:40.180symptoms come back and i've been talking to people who were on ssris or benzodiazepines
00:28:44.680being like yeah sometimes symptoms can come back from this like original neurological injury
00:28:50.520so do you have any information on like why do some people get such severe they call it
00:28:57.560protracted withdrawal or something like that but why do some people get so sick when they
00:29:02.720stop these medications and some people don't and some people can take years
00:29:07.900well um i think what the average doctor who prescribes ssri's thinks is based on the
00:29:18.500randomized controlled trials, which show that withdrawal problems are rare, benign, and quickly
00:29:26.980self-resolving. The problem with the trials is that the average person is on SSRIs for five years
00:29:34.180and almost all of the trials are 12 weeks or shorter. And there's one trial that there's only
00:29:44.080one placebo-controlled trial that is a year long, and there are no trials of them at all anywhere
00:29:52.040that are five years long. Now, if you look at the observational literature where people are surveyed
00:29:59.880about whether they have the withdrawal problems and how bad they were and how long they were on
00:30:04.660them, what that shows is that it looks a lot worse at one year than it does at 12 weeks from the
00:30:10.960trials, two years, if you've been on them for two years, getting off is a lot harder.
00:30:16.980And then if you've been on them for five years or eight years or 11 years or 12 years,
00:30:32.840Because if you look at the people who have been on for at least one year, 38% of them
00:30:37.920tried to get off and went back on because they couldn't get off.
00:30:40.960um and the other people are the ones with the withdrawal problems right yeah so i i do think
00:30:48.220that the general uh description of this problem that conventional medicine sees is basically a
00:30:57.360scam which is they know that their trials aren't long enough but they like that and you know because
00:31:05.700it's like every time you test something for 12 weeks, this is true in nutrition as well.
00:31:13.140Studies of fish oil, for example, look, high dose fish oil looks great when you take it for 12
00:31:17.940weeks. It doesn't look so hot when you take it for four years, five years, six years. And that's
00:31:22.480not to say that people shouldn't eat fish or shouldn't get omega-3 fatty acids. It's just
00:31:27.700to say that you can't generalize from a 12-week trial to a five-year experience. And so I think
00:31:35.520this might be a lot more normal than we think it is. And I think a lot of people don't ever go off
00:31:40.180of them because of that. And then a lot of people who do just aren't taken seriously. Like when I
00:31:45.360started writing about this, then I got numerous comments from people who said, you know, like my
00:31:51.000entire life was destroyed by this. Yeah. And, you know, I lost my marriage. I lost my job. I lost
00:31:57.460everything. And like, no one believes me, you know. So I think this is very common. But the
00:32:03.420principal problem I think is just being on them for a long time but the you know if like if we
00:32:10.780were to pray like father forgive pharma because they know not what they do like it would be very
00:32:16.220very literal in the sense that pharma doesn't know what their drugs do and it's not really
00:32:22.120their fault that they don't know it's that the human metabolism is way more complex than any of
00:32:29.400us understand and so it always turns out that if you invent something that's never existed before
00:32:35.480because you think it acts on one receptor to do one thing um it does a bunch of other stuff that
00:32:42.640you have no idea about possibly as a primary mechanism not they call it off target but what
00:32:48.060they mean is we didn't intend that yeah and it's like you know so i think pharma doesn't but now
00:32:53.760they are to blame for, you know, knowing that things are probably not so hot at five years of
00:33:00.380use than they are at 12 weeks and designing their trials to not know about those things like that's
00:33:05.580their fault. But it would be very, very hard for anyone to come up with a new drug and then with
00:33:11.480any reasonable timeframe, everything that it does. Now, it turns out, though, that SSRI science
00:33:18.380basically destroyed the integrity of serotonin science. So the idea that serotonin is primarily
00:33:25.180acting in the brain, primarily acting on neurons, primarily to boost your mood and make you happy
00:33:31.560is total nonsense. And that is basically a marketing campaign that arose because of the
00:33:37.900SSRIs in the 80s. And the reality is that serotonin's primary role is to assist mitochondrial
00:33:46.360adaptations to absolute or relative deficits of oxygen. Oh my gosh. That's completely different.
00:33:53.800Yeah. That's not the same thing at all. Right. Okay. So when you, if you take,
00:33:57.780if you inhale and you take a breath in, even if you were very good at breathing,
00:34:03.160not every segment of your lungs would be equally oxygenated, but most of us just
00:34:08.000breathe like shit anyway. Right. So we, we, you know, use a third of our lungs or whatever. Right.
00:34:13.180So you need some way to not send the blood that the heart is pumping to all of the lungs equally and to only go after the oxygenated parts.
00:34:25.080Serotonin is the traffic cop that sends the blood away from the poorly oxygenated parts to the oxygenated parts.