TRANSCRIPTS : MODULE 4

TRANSCRIPTS : MODULE 4

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 4 (Page 1) Kevin: Alright, welcome back! This is Kevin Gianni from The Blood Test Blueprint. We are now in module four, so let s get started. So we ve gone through nine modules, and now we re moving into number ten, which is our last one, which are adrenal tests. If you re anything like me, you ve probably experienced stress before, and this is when your adrenal testing comes into play because your cortisol levels the cortisol levels in your body if they re elevated, if they re too high, if your adrenals are overworking, then a lot of bad things are going to happen. And Dr. Williams is going to explain some of these. So let s get started with adrenals. Dr. Williams: The adrenals are the modern, most challenged organ, and then the backlash goes onto the disruption of your glucose metabolism, and your thyroid as we just mentioned. And for women, their menstrual cycle and their ovarian hormones, like progesterone, because progesterone is very closely linked to how cortisol works and how stress works in the body. So the adrenals are huge. What s clinically interesting is that you rarely see true adrenal burnout, where it s complete there s no, very little adrenal activity and very low hormones. We almost never see that. That s a real disease called Addison s disease. And people have copper-colored skin and they retain fluid, and that s a true adrenal deficiency. And you rarely see people who are truly adrenal excess, and that s called Cushing s syndrome. But you see everything in between, and every shape and every combination possible. So the average person, and even many of the holistic doctors and even many naturopaths, they tend to talk about this adrenal stress-related problems as if they were either adrenal burnout or too much adrenal effect. It is a wide spectrum and interconnected with the higher centers in the brain the hypothalamus and pituitary and other hormone systems and other endocrine glands in the body. I ll try to keep it simple as possible and we ll focus on the testing. Now there are two types of testing. I m going to talk a little about both, but since this is blood test profile, we really will focus on that. The adrenal hormones have a diurnal rhythm. In the morning, they should be relatively high, and then they should taper down towards midday, and then kind of smooth out during the afternoon. And then at night time, they should go low. And that s when you re able to rest and sleep. If they become imbalanced in other words, you have enough cortisol your adrenals are making, but the first thing that happens is they might not make enough in the morning, so again you have the morning tiredness. They might make too much at night, so you can t sleep properly. You might make too much when you re exercising. You may over exercise, or go to exercise when you re stressed, so now you have adrenalin going up, and you have cortisol going up and now you have insulin going all over the place, and your heart rate is going up and your exercise is actually now counterproductive. So there s a wide range of how these work. First, is going out of balance. And when you test your cortisol and your DHEA sulfate, which is abbreviated as DHEA-S those are the two main adrenal hormones we look at, and then also pregnenolone is that you want to go in again early. I always recommend fasting, testing always before 9 AM. And if you do that you re going to be in good shape. The range is in micrograms per deciliter, and it s 6.2 to 19.4. If you re above 20,

(Page 2) The Complete Blood Test Blue Print Program you re now having too much cortisol. What I see in the clinic is people with 21, 22, 23, they re just above the range, but that s still a little bit too much. And then again when we see people on the low end, you don t see them too many people with low cortisol in the bloodstream. You see often more of that in the salivary testing, because now that s out into the tissue where they re not getting enough out into the tissue. But even then, we don t see a lot of totally low cortisone. Most of it is in the high-normal range. So what we re finding that even if the cortisol in the morning is 15 or 16, or 17 if it s anywhere above 15 that might be just a little bit too high, and people will start having symptoms. The desirable range, therefore, would be 6.2 to 15.0. But optimal, the more chilled people, are going to have a range that s a little more towards the middle, around ten or less. So we usually say that 5 to 10 is the real optimal. It s not too low and it s definitely not too high. But you want it balanced with your DHEA-S. So you want strong DHEA and moderate cortisol levels. You want the cortisol, of course, higher when you need it, but the DHEA should be more stable. And DHEA-S is an age-matched hormone laboratory range. So when you re younger, when you re 20 years old, your levels are very high, close to 500. And when you re over 75, your level are often below 100. However, we see people who are even in their 20s sometimes that have levels at 75. But for the average adult, between the age of say 35 to 55, a male desirable range would be 250 to 450, and for a woman, it would be 150 to 250. And that s also in micrograms per deciliter. If you really want to go for optimal performance, then you want to have, for men, 350 to 450, even tweaked a little bit higher than 450, and for women, 200 to 250. Now why it is important for women to stay lower and the men can have much higher? It is because DHEA is an androgen. It s a male hormone, like testosterone in the body. Nowhere near as active, of course, as testosterone, but it can convert into testosterone particularly, women have mechanisms in their bodies that convert it quite easily. And too much DHEA can cause acne and other problems. So you don t want to give women get their levels too high. The physical characteristics or features of cortisol excess, if you have too much cortisol, you re going to start to participate in a condition called metabolic syndrome. We originally called it syndrome X. That s where people have weight gain in the belly and around the trunk of the body. Women will have breasts will become smaller and they ll become fatter in the middle. They ll lose their waist. So an increased waist-tohip ratio, and more fat depositing along the ribs and on the sides of the back, and a thickening often of the back of the neck. And people with full metabolic syndrome they pretty much lose their neck. They become very overweight and they have the big center of their body and thin arms and legs, and almost no neck. Those are the really advanced stages, and they have the true insulin resistance phenomena. And of course they retain a lot of fluid. When you have cortisol deficiency, you become thinner and even quite skinny. And you have fatigue, severe fatigue, and the fatigue that s associated with adrenal deficiency is a flu-like. You just don t feel well, but you don t have a fever, you re not coughing or sneezing or anything like that. And no matter how much you rest, you just never seem to get better. If you exercise, it s difficult to exercise. You want to quit early. Your exercise tolerance is low, and

Transcripts Module 4 (Page 3) you either feel worse or not any better at all. They tend to crave salt and also sugar. And there s a connection between insulin and glucose metabolism. They will have more allergies, asthma, eczema also, and blood pressure is often low. When you take their blood pressure lying down or sitting down, and then you ask them to stand up quickly, and then you immediately take the blood pressure again you leave the cuff on the arm and it drops by ten points, especially the lower number, you can be almost sure that that person has adrenal deficiency. If it gets very severe, as I mentioned, they have increased skin pigmentation. People will say, Oh, you look so tan! and you never go out in the sun. But if it gets really bad, severe, then it s almost a coppery color. They re also very easily stressed. They get irritated easily. They have a decreased tolerance to stress. Everything is too much for them. And there is a lot of mental confusion and varying degrees of that and the thinking is not really clear. Not the slow thinking of a low thyroid, but just kind of a confused thinking. And the immunity goes down with cortisol deficiency, as well as DHEA deficiency. You have a longer time in recovering from common infections. And then with that if that blood pressure drops, people also feel dizzy when they stand up. So it s very important to normalize your adrenal hormones, and the way to do that is to start off with reducing stress. Now that s almost an impossible thing to do. You tell the people, You re going to have to lower your stress, and they go, How? other then tuning out tuning in and dropping out type of thing. But meditation is a good start. And slow-paced exercise, walking, swimming, tai chi, those slow therapeutic yoga, are very, very helpful. They start to recalibrate the nervous system and the immune system and the endocrine system, kind of starting with the thyroid and the adrenal glands. So you also want to optimize rest and sleep. Now let s take a look at if your cortisol is too high. First of all, what can you do? If it s too high, again, lowering stress is really important with those people. And they re going in a wrong direction and often we say that they go you use too much, even if the cortisol level is like 18, and then you kind of crash down because you can t sustain those even moderately high levels, and then you go towards adrenal fatigue. There s not a lot that lowers it down. The things that we use, number one, is phosphatidylserine, an amino acid, and that s 100 mg twice a day. American ginseng root is very useful. It s not too stimulating and it helps to modulate cortisol, either raise it up or lower it down. In the office, I use an injection of gerovital or GH3, and it works quite well. We re able to normalize cortisol in a matter of 6 weeks with weekly injections. And if your cortisol is low, which is what most people are concerned about, then you have to replace the nutrients that the adrenal gland is made up with vitamin C being the most important. The adrenal gland is one of the most tissues high in vitamin C in the body. And if you re using a lot of vitamin C, or if there s not enough, your adrenal glands will be weak. So often people you ll find if you take their vitamin C levels, and you work it up, starting with say 1,000 milligrams or 1,500 milligrams that s 1 gram or 1.5 grams and then you gradually work them up everyday going up another 1,000 or so. Often at about 6 grams that s 6,000 milligrams all of the sudden they feel like they woke up. And it takes that usually 4.5 to 6 or more grams of vitamin C to saturate the adrenal gland and to get it functioning. However, as you get up to those higher dosages, that can

(Page 4) The Complete Blood Test Blue Print Program cause abdominal bloating and diarrhea. But people who have adrenal deficiency they tend to just soak that vitamin C up and they have less of those gastrointestinal symptoms. But you still have to be careful. Go up gradually, and see how you feel. The second nutrient is pantothenic acid. That s a B5 vitamin, very important for adrenal health. You re going to take 250 to 500 milligrams twice a day every day, up to 1,500 milligrams total per day. Now the other things that help low adrenals are the medicinal mushrooms. Particularly the Reishi, or the ganoderma mushrooms from either Japan or China, and cordyceps. I like to use the extracts and I recommend 500 milligrams a day. But there are also very good now powdered forms. It s the whole mushroom or cordyceps that is where the water is removed and processed after being grown in the lab to have a very pure product. It s more concentrated in the sense that a lot of the cellulose and all of the water s removed, but it s still not a concentrated extract. But a little bit a teaspoon in your daily smoothie can help a lot. And then there are many herbs that are useful. The holy basil is very good. Astragalus is also useful. As I mentioned, American ginseng. And then the big one for adrenals is Schizandra berry Schizandra sinensis. In Chinese, it s called Wu Wei Zi or five taste berry. A very, very good, probably number one on the list of adrenal supportive herbs. Here s the caveat. If your cholesterol is too low, like below 125 because adrenal hormones as well as testosterone, and all the other steroid hormones, require cholesterol molecule to build the hormones on that s the scaffolding they use you may have insufficient levels of the cholesterol molecule to build hormones. So it can have a significant impact on adrenalin, and also gonadal steroid synthesis. So for men, you ll see low adrenal hormones and often in the pregnenolone, all the way down to say you re a 25-year old and they have the level of a 75-year old. And also, low testosterone. They just don t have the substrate to build from. The pregnenolone I want to mention before I go into DHEA I call the overlooked hormone. It s the grandfather of all the hormones as DHEA is the mother of all the steroid hormones. There s no associated symptom of it unlike cortisol or DHEA. And the features of deficiency could be just declining memory or stiffness or general mood, lower mood or sleep disturbances all the things that stress causes or that aging causes. And the levels for healthy levels, for me and my recommendations to my patients, are at least 100, over 100, or 150 is better for both men and women. Finally, DHEA that s the big one, and that s the easy one to work with and replace. If your DHEA-S is really low below the desirable and below the optimal and you almost never see anybody who is below the reference range because they re so wide, then the solution is replacement, taking micronized DHEA. And the same with pregnenolone. You take micronized pregnenolone. The dosage for pregnenolone, starting dose is 10 milligrams. You work your way up to 30. There are some people who are very, very low and need 100 milligrams or more twice a day, always with food for the absorption. And for DHEA, you start with 10 milligrams for men and 5 milligrams for women. And for men, you start to work them up from 10 to 25, and then to 50 milligrams twice a day, and women, usually from 5 to 10, and no higher

Transcripts Module 4 (Page 5) than 25 milligrams twice a day. Occasionally, we need to go higher in some cases. But it s absorbed very, very well by mouth. There s no harm to the liver and it works relatively quickly. The benefits of replacing DHEA are of course increased energy, improved mood, better sleep, and you have more protection in the brain tissue and the nerve neuronal tissue and the hypothalamus. It helps reduce inflammation. It helps manage autoimmune processes. All autoimmune cases like rheumatoid arthritis generally have very, very low DHEA, even in younger people. It improves your skin. It makes it thicker and shinier. It improves wound healing. It improves your response to infection, from cold and flu, and from many other diseases. It decreases your risk for cardiovascular problems, improves libido and sexual performance, and improves brain function and memory. It promotes weight loss. It helps the metabolism of the adipose tissue the fatty tissue so you lose your belly fat, and increases lean muscles mass. So DHEA is very important. You want strong DHEA. You want moderate to mid-range cortisol. And you want a good amount of pregnenolone not too much, not too little, in order to have adrenal balance. Kevin: Dr. Williams: Kevin: So you mentioned these herbs under low cortisol. Could they be used if you have high cortisol as well? The only one that I recommend using for high cortisol is the American ginseng. It s very difficult to get high cortisol down. They don t really lift up, they don t up raise the cortisol that much, but they assist in helping the regulation. I think holy basil is okay. It s not going to it s going to help modulate the adrenal gland. Schizandra berry I would not use in high cortisol. And I would never use red ginseng or Korean red ginseng or any of the Asian ginsengs for a high cortisol, only for low cortisol. But American ginseng root is a good modulator. Astragalus root I mentioned is very mild in terms of its effect on the adrenal system. It s a complement to the other herbs and should be used in low cortisol and not in high cortisol. Well we ve come to the end of module four. I hope you enjoyed that. We do have a bonus coming up for you, so be sure to check your download page for the bonus. And talk to you next time!