Adapted from episode 115 of The Perfect Stool podcast with Reed Davis, HHP, CNT, Founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® (FDN), and edited for readability.
Lindsey:
So why don’t we start with, what is Functional Diagnostic Nutrition?
Reed Davis:
Well, it’s a name I gave something I had been doing for 10 years. When I first started teaching again, after spending 10 years in a clinic, I put a course together finally, by popular demand, and had to call it something, so I just dreamed it up. Functional: is very functional, it’s all about how we function. We use a lot of lab testing for function, how are things working, etc. And then diagnostic in nature, but never medical diagnosis. So that’s a bit weird, but functional and diagnostic in nature. Because we’re using data, we’re running lab work. And then nutrition because I was a nutritionist, nutritional therapist. And nutrition is included in our protocols, although it’s not all of our protocols. So it’s more like nurturing, but that would have sounded even weirder.
Lindsey:
Okay. But the program is called Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and people can get certified in that?
Reed Davis:
Yeah, we’re popularly known as FDN. And there’s a lot of FDNers or the practitioners really all over the world now. And again, I started teaching in 2008, I just needed a name, and now we’re stuck with it.
Lindsey:
And is this in addition to studying something else, then people add on this certification? Or is this the entire course? Can you do this course?
Reed Davis:
That’s a good question. So most of the graduates, it takes 10 months, I can teach you what I learned in 10 years, took me 10 years to learn, in about 10 months. It’s self-paced, so you could do less, but you know, anyone could do it. And it’s the kind of thing that most people do have a college degree but not all, and you don’t have to. Some have a certificate or two or three or four in something, whether it’s nutrition or personal fitness and the things that go along with those certifications; people get more. And then this is kind of the coup d’état. You know, it’s an upleveling in every way.
Lindsey:
Great. That sounds like a cool program. So we talked about maybe talking a little bit about stress and how stress can start the downward spiral of health that often terminates in gut health issues. Can you talk a bit about that?
Reed Davis:
Sure. Yeah, it’s very popular and common to say, all disease begins in the gut. I think even Hippocrates, Muhammad, a lot of people said that, but I found that it actually begins with some stress, or some possibly hidden stressor, possibly the stress doesn’t exist anymore. But it has started this downward spiral that circles around to the gut so often. That’s why we think disease begins in the gut. But I can show you on paper, you know, with the lab test, how stress in its various forms causes breakdown, causes what we consider a catabolic condition. So it throws us out of balance, and the body starts to break down. And I can show you a progression, various of these downward spirals, again, on paper with the lab testing, and it does circle around the gut, the immune system and digestion and things like that. So we get a lot of symptoms and disease processes are going in that area. But when we get out of balance from anabolic to mostly catabolic, then that’s when the body starts to break down.
Lindsey:
And can you dig more into the actual details biochemically of what’s going on?
Reed Davis:
Yeah, well, for 25 years I’ve been using, we just call it a Stress and Hormone panel, because it looks at the major stress hormones, cortisol and DHEA. And these are both made in the adrenal glands and they counterpose each other, one is a kind of counter balancer to the other. Well you need both, so your body’s supposed to break down and rebuild. That’s how we get rid of old cells and get new ones. So there’s catabolism, which breaks down, that’s measured by cortisol. So if your cortisol is elevated, you may be in a catabolic state, unless you have enough DHEA, which again, is counter regulatory, which will be building you up. So you’re breaking down, building up, breaking down, building up. And so it’s cortisol and DHEA. When we see those out of balance, and especially in cortisol dominance, well, we know that you’re breaking down and guess what the people who come to us for testing feel like? They’re breaking down. So it totally correlates. We call that clinical correlation. And it’s very, very important in our world, Lindsey never to treat the paper. It’s not about the paper. That just tells us something about a person, and it’s about that person. And so from there, there’s lots of downward spirals that can occur. One that’s obvious and by the way, we measure on the same test, which is saliva, which is done at home in the convenience and safety and you know, it’s not expensive and things like that. A lot of what we try to use are self-tests. So this easy to use, not expensive saliva test gives us a catabolic to anabolic, but also will show us the sex hormones, the progesterone and estrogen, of course, the testosterone, and so on. You can bring it down as far as you want, but those three alone are pretty good markers. And they’re out of balance, in many, many cases, and guess what? Very high clinical correlation with how people are feeling. So finally, from a test result, people find that instead of a typical standard medical bloodwork, oh, nothing’s wrong with you, or your bloodwork looks normal, we actually see the subtle changes in the saliva, which is a bioavailable marker, or analyte, and we do it on every single person. And from there, you get into the other tests, there’s urine and there’s stool, and there’s finger stick, blood testing for all kinds of other functions that we would consider downstream from those that are kind of a measurement of stress.
Lindsey:
So I have a question that I’ve been curious about for a while. I have done these tests, saliva, cortisol, you get the four spits, it’s like what 9:00, 12:00, 3:00, and something like that anyway. So there’s four spits, and then the DHEA-S. And what I’m wondering about is, what kind of test retest reliability is there? Like, if we did that the next day, are we going to find the same thing? Or what if they just happened to have a stressful day that evening, and then their cortisol is elevated?
Reed Davis:
Well, there are instructions along with the tests to try to mitigate that potential. So you know, you will take an ordinary day, if there’s such a thing, not a day, when you have a wedding, and not a day after you got kicked out of your house, you know, some godforsaken thing. So you take a typical day, and there are patterns that are fairly reliable. But regardless of that consideration that you just mentioned, one day to the next, everything’s relative. So we don’t measure the tests in a vacuum. We measure them relative to a person and what was going on that day? So we might see a high afternoon cortisol, for instance. Well, if that’s going on every day, it would really tell us something important, like you’re eating something at lunch that you’re sensitive to, and your body’s reacting to it. Or your blood sugar is low; you’re eating the wrong food; your insulin is spiking and crashing and your blood sugar, cortisol kicks in to try to raise your blood sugar. These are the things that we know about. Because again, for 25 years, we’ve been studying the use of these labs, clinically; they’re not done in a vacuum. And you can’t say because one person had this, it means the same thing in the next person. You have to go back to the person and get clinical correlation. So while there are some variations, that’s a great consideration, Lindsey, very smart question. The answer is the test results are interpreted relative to that person that day. And I’ll say this, to summarize, everything, every client is a study of one. There’s no courts. There’s no lineup 10 people and that’s fine. There’s you and your test results. And does it relate? Does it tell us anything about you? And so that’s why we use it, saliva, because it’s bioavailable in the moment.
Lindsey:
So will you typically ask someone to record anything about their day that they do that test? Because I often send people off to do tests and then I don’t see them for six weeks. So by the time the test comes around, they don’t remember what they did or didn’t do that day.
Reed Davis:
Well, likely, you want that person to jot down some things. As a matter of fact, some of our tests, we do even have journals. They ask you those questions. So yeah, they include a questionnaire, we have our own questionnaires. And so it would be appropriate to do that. It isn’t always done. Six weeks is a long time. We’re looking at usually to get all of our labs back in about three weeks, sometimes four, because we don’t run just one test on anybody; that just wouldn’t tell you enough.
Lindsey:
So we talked about then the DHEA and the cortisol, so say that gets dysregulated, how does that then lead to gut health issues?
Reed Davis:
Oh, it’s quite interesting how that works. So when you’re catabolic, you’re likely going to start losing the mucosal barrier. So matter of fact, cortisol suppresses secretory IgA, that is the main immunoglobulin, main defense element in the gut. It’s very abundant; it’s there to protect you. And that layer, we call it the mucosal barrier, gets very thin and it loses its ability to fight against those things that we want to fight against. And so yeah, you measure that actually on the same lab test. So the secretory IgA is included in our saliva test. These are tests we developed over the years that we asked labs to do for us. Say we want the secretory IgA on there. We also want melatonin on there, which is another hormone that comes into play, all these things are in play to some degree or other. Remember, this is really important as us we’re not looking for a medical diagnosis; we think people have had enough of those. And so instead, we want to find out just what are the healing opportunities? What are the opportunities? What can we do together with our clients to improve things? So these are not, they don’t reach the threshold of a medical diagnosis. And again, many people are told you don’t have one, you’re not a medical case. And I might add, yet.
Lindsey:
So what is the name of the test then that you do and whose test is it?
Reed Davis:
So we use Fluids IQ, we just call it the Stress and Hormone Panel. Fluids IQ is the name of the lab out of Canada. They ship their kids everywhere. They have catered to us to some degree with adding markers, adding analytes that I think are very important in all my experience.
Lindsey:
The Fluids IQ Stress and Hormone panel. And does that include sex hormones, as well?
Reed Davis:
Oh, yeah, cortisol, DHEA, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, secretory IgA (sIgA), melatonin, all on one easy-to-do, at-home lab test kit tells us a lot about you. Does it tell us everything we want to know? No, the idea is to run tests that cover an entire constellation of healing opportunities. Because again, you’ll run up to people who, “Oh I ran a test like that, I ran it”. And you’ve worked on that one thing, but it didn’t work. Because the way stress works, it’s multi causal, multifactorial, and these multi causal factors weigh upstream, sometimes, sometimes really far upstream, happened a long time ago. And all of these causal factors are having an effect on each other. And that’s not even measurable, sometimes not singly. And so you have to get the whole constellation. So hormones, yeah, for sure. The immune system. Yeah, we talked about sIgA. But there are other immune system markers. And those are on the other tests. So hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, and some other things, we want to get as many healing opportunities as possible and sorted all out, give people the things they can do at home, an epigenetic lifestyle program that will make improvements to every cell,, tissue organ, system in the body. Why single one thing out? We know that certain diagnoses: “Oh, I found your problem”. Yeah, right. You know, you found a problem, you think a marker that’s out of place, and you can treat the paper if you want to, the person might even feel better for a little while. But if you don’t address all of it, which is our job, then likely those same symptoms will come back. You have to increase dosage on the medications and different things, the symptoms will come back, or new symptoms will appear. And that’s just another endless cycle. So we want to end the cycle of trial and error by getting a very comprehensive outlook.
Lindsey:
So when you see that decreased Secretory IgA are you approaching that by starting with addressing the adrenals? Or are you dealing with that directly? How do you how do you handle that?
Reed Davis:
Well, our protocols address every cell, tissue, organ, system at once. And so it just gets swept up in the lifestyle and epigenetic program. But that, in particular, if it’s low, what does that mean? Well, it means your mucosal barrier likely is worn thin, and you don’t have the same immune system you used to. But what if it’s high? Ah, different problems, more like a current infection, something it’s responding appropriately to some offender, some overgrowth, bacteria, parasite, something, and it’s actually responding quite appropriately. So high or low tells us different things about that person, and indicates a certain course of action. Where that person could self-treat, we hope, or sometimes we send people right back to their physicians. Say, hey, you doctor missed this. So let’s go see what that doctor says about it. And if they recommend something, we might concur. Might want to go more natural. Who knows? It’s all up to the person.
Lindsey:
Yeah. So what kinds of other tests then do you like to do with your patients?
Reed Davis:
To get the entire or not the entire, but a big picture, the constellation? If I showed you two stars and said “What constellation is it?” You’d say “I don’t know. It depends. Where’s the other stars?” So we want to get as many as possible so we can actually look at hormone, immune, digestion, detox. You’ve got a lot of room for improvement here; we identified numerous healing opportunities. And now we can set forth on a path that would correct all of it. As long as there’s no downward spiral that’s really contracted, which is where doctors fit into the picture. So they fit in very nicely. If the downward spiral is really contracted, if there’s time, then we expect your body will heal. It wants to; there’s an innate intelligence, and we would play to that let’s coach up function, while we cut down contributors to what I call metabolic chaos.
Lindsey:
So which specific tests do you order?
Reed Davis:
There’s the Mucosal Barrier Assessment, the Metabolic Wellness Panel, and there’s a GI Map stool test*. And there’s a food sensitivity test. And along with this Stress and Hormone Panel, that’s five really good panels. And you know, it’s an investment in the lab work, we can’t help with that cost. We work with good labs who have reasonable prices, we think, and no one makes money on lab work, not us, we simply charge you for the interpretation on top of that.
Lindsey:
Right, whose test is the Metabolic Wellness Panel.
Reed Davis:
So for that, we use Fluids IQ as well. And that’s a urine test. So it’s got three main markers on it, urinary bile acid, sulfates, it’s 8OHdG, which is eight hydroxy deoxyguanosine. There’s a mouthful; that’s why we call it 8OHdG. So and then indican, which is a really good old test. And when I say indican to some practitioners, they go, “Wow, I forgot about that test.” So I learned it in school and we never run it. While your doctors could all run it in their office if they wanted to. It’s a simple urine test. I don’t know, when I was a kid, we used to give the doctor some urine and they do it in in-office testing. Now there’s none of that; it’s all farmed out, you know. So it’s pretty interesting. Well, there’s not as much of it as it used to be anyway. And they don’t do anything anymore. That tells you if you’re breaking down protein or not to bacterial action, in order to break down, absorb protein, whatever you’re eating, the protein needs to be broken down by bacteria, in addition to the pepsin and the hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Going into the small intestine, you need this bacteria breakdown to get proper absorption of protein, and protein is where you get your amino acids from. And by the way, that’s what makes neurotransmitters. You know what neurotransmitters are made for. So there’s a whole long, again, downward spiral or chain of events, list of symptoms that can occur just from having positive indican. And it’s great, it could indicate dysbiosis; you don’t have enough good bacteria to get proper digestion. So that’s remember I said hormone, immune, digestion. And by the way, that tells you there’s something going on with your immune system too, because now you don’t have enough good bacteria. And you have an abundance probably of the unwanted bionts. And then from there it just goes worse if you don’t find it up and do something about
Lindsey:
Oh, sorry, I was just going to ask what the name of the immune test was.
Reed Davis:
Well, the secretory IgA is a really good marker that’s in the saliva test. So now you’ve got it. You got a couple of markers now with the indican. Now you add the 8OHdG. That’s a measurement of oxidative stress. There’s lots of things going to be oxidizing; lipid peroxides would tell you if you have oxidization of cell membranes, which is never a good thing. Then there’s also on that test urinary bile acids. Now if those are in excess, you likely have spillover from the liver of the bile acids, telling you you’ve got a congested liver. Haha, now we’re looking at detoxification problems. So you’ve looked at hormone immune, digestion, detoxification, and you can we do it on every person. It’s a little finger stick. So you just prick your finger and you drip some blood to a blotter. It dries, you send it into the labs, not expensive. And that will tell us. We look at the zonulin, we look at histamine and the diamine oxidase or DAO, and the histamine to DAO ratio is very important. So this tells us more about that mucosal barrier. So we’re looking at stress, looking at ooh, that’s your immune system sliding down. That’s affecting digestion and the liver is getting congested, especially if you have that high zonulin and leaky gut kind of a thing. And the mucosal barrier is further breaking down in that your villi are atrophying or the crypts are becoming swollen. We call it crypt hyperplasia. So you get an unhealthy situation, lots and lots of healing opportunities. And that’s just three simple tests one saliva, one urine and one finger stick.
Lindsey:
What’s the finger stick test called?
Reed Davis:
Lindsey:
Okay, is that also a Fluids IQ test?
Reed Davis:
That’s Fluids and that’s the three Fluids tests we use. They’re a good foundation to find out what’s really wrong so that you can go about fixing it.
Lindsey:
Okay, and then there was a GI Map, which I’m well familiar with. And then what was the last one called?
Reed Davis:
The Mediator Release Test or MRT for food sensitivities, just for 172 foods. So why would you run that? Well, because you’ll never heal the gut, and reduce your stress markers back to normal, which by the way, regulates blood sugar, and a lot of things, insulin levels and things. So there’s a lot of connectors, we care much more about connecting the dots than the dots, we don’t single one or two or three out and say, oh, here, take this for that and take this for this. No, it requires looking at it in concert. It just works. It outperforms every other system. It’s why it’s so popular. So those three tests tell you what’s wrong. The other two, that GI Map tells you what else is going on inside the gut microbiome and you can find parasites, bacteria, funguses, even test for a couple of viruses. And then the microbiome itself, the balance between certain families of bacteria need to be highly balanced. So that the dysbiosis you found on the urine test is actually identified, further speciated to some degree with the GI Map, which is a stool test. So far, we haven’t had to go for a blood draw and get our veins poked. And then the food sensitivity test, the really good one does require a blood draw. But there’s all these drive by vampires, I mean phlebotomists, who do the at-home blood testing, come out and help you get the kit done.
Lindsey:
Yeah. So I had heard of the MRT. And I’ve never used it with anyone. I’m curious, are you at all concerned if somebody is doing this testing initially, that if they have a leaky gut, they’re just going to have everything they eat show up on it?
Reed Davis:
No, it’s really surprising. That’s true with certain tests that they’re IgG or IgA or something like IgM, might be elevated to an awful lot of things that aren’t really a problem. There’s all these cross-reactivity possibilities. The MRT is a completely different form of measurement. So Mediator Release Tests aren’t as dependent on that as some of the other tests. That’s why we prefer it. There’s always green foods. So that’s the good ones. There’s green, yellow, and red. You avoid the yellows and reds, but we try to get our clients to focus more looking on the green. There’s green vegetables, there’s green fruits, there’s green forms of produce, and it even measures condiments and spices and things and it’s really valuable. I’ve seen people completely turn around. And I would attribute a lot of it to that one test. I mean, talking about almost miracle, I can’t use the word cure and don’t want to, but turnarounds, kids, oh my goodness, so much. And by the way, you say it can change a bit, and as you get heals, you may have a few less sensitivities to answer your question a bit. And I’ve tested people who are on immunosuppressants, you know, for joint, skin, and other problems, and it will throw the test off, certain tests. It’ll look like you don’t have a lot of sensitivity because your immune system is being suppressed. So that’s another reason we like to use MRT; it’s not as affected by those kind of medications.
Lindsey:
I think one of the things maybe my hesitancy in ever using it was that it was, I think it was pretty expensive compared to some of the other ones, which I also don’t use, IgG tests, but also that I think you have to go through a dietitian or somebody who’s . . .
Reed Davis:
It’s expensive if you go the retail route, but the lab fee for practitioners actually, I think is reasonable. You know, I always say to people, if you think getting well is expensive, try staying sick. Because the loss of work and the unhappy – having no joy in one’s life – to me is way too much of a price to pay.
Lindsey:
Yeah, I often say this to my parents who I test and advise yearly on what to do and not to do as they’re in their early 80s. And I keep getting push back because they’re so used to the regular medical model that they followed their entire life, especially for my father, and he’s like, “I don’t want to take any more than seven pills at any one meal.” You know, it’s like “Yeah, okay, but how about stop smoking a cigar a day, drinking three drinks a day?” You know, you might have to take some pills to make up for the lifestyle habits you’re insisting on continuing.
Reed Davis:
With you 100%, I used to work with my parents, my father passed away at 85; but my mom is 93 and still living well. And I say, well, she’s the one that listened to me most.
Lindsey:
Well, that’s what I say. I say, how much is your life worth? And it’s amazing that you’ll still get pushback like, well, if I have to live like this, it’s not . . . I’m like, “Really? Really? Like swallowing two swallowfuls . . . “, cause he can toss down four or five pills at once, like “two handfuls of pills is not worth a year of your life?”
Reed Davis:
Yes. And, you know, if you eat really good food and supplements, you can really supercharge the process, the healing process and the maintenance, you know, there’s just not enough nutrition in food anymore. The food is grown in depleted soils so you’re not getting – you need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, antioxidants, phytonutrients, trace elements, and whatever else is in there. And that’s a mouthful there. It’s not in the food. So you can only supplement, you get all that. And by the way, if you’ve done the lab work, you have a much better idea of what would be helpful, right?
Lindsey:
Right. Of course. No, I’ve heard that said a lot. I mean, I listen to all sorts of health podcasts and I have a little bit of a push back in my head, which is okay, but what if you’re buying the best quality, organic foods? Is the soil depleted there too? Aren’t they composting? Aren’t they doing what you’re supposed to do?
Reed Davis:
It’s hard to figure, if you know, the farmer, you know, that’s one thing. But the reason we buy organic food in the grocery store is mostly to avoid the herbicides and pesticides and the bad things. So if for no other reason buying organic, you’re avoiding the chemicals. And that alone is worth paying the extra to buy organic. But are you getting much more nutrition? It’s pretty hard to say because we don’t know who the farmers really are. We know that they can’t use the poisons. And that’s good thing. But is it enough? I don’t think so. I mean, I eat organic. Just every time. I mean, my wife and I are very meticulous. we will not eat the food if we think it has poison on it. But also, even you can take that to a step further, like seed oils and things. We have a problem with labeling. Sometimes on some of our products, especially in restaurants, you can’t figure out what they’re using to cook with and things that are not very good for you. So can I give your listeners a tip? It’s an app, I have it on my phone right here. It’s called Seed Oil Scout or SOS. It’s in the app store. There’s a free version. And it will tell you, you can punch in your favorite restaurant and it will grade it in terms of seed oil. Why do you care about that? Because we’re eating way too much Omega 6 in this country, versus the Omega 3s. And this 6 to 3 ratio is critical for long-term longevity. It’s not going to show up tomorrow or the next day, or even this year. But year after year, you start getting the cardiovascular disease and other problems. So that long list of other long-term markers on top of what I just told you about the more immediate need healing opportunity markers are very critical in our world.
Lindsey:
Yeah. So talk a little bit about Omega 6s. So I run on a lot of people Metabolomix or NutrEvals. And so I see their omega 3s and Omega 6s and I have noticed this phenomenon over and over where at some point they went on omega 3s maybe, or maybe I see that they are short on omega 3s. And I suggest that might be a supplement they try. And so they do that for a bit. Then they take the test. And then I see the Omega 3s are way high. And now the Omega 6s have gotten pushed down because they’re trying to do everything perfectly. They’re staying away from the seed oils, they’re eating nothing but extra virgin olive oil and eating avocados or maybe avocado oil. And then all of a sudden their Omega 6s have tanked. So what’s the balance? What’s the perfect ratio for the person who’s just trying to eat healthy, who is not like severely impacted? Like what is the right balance?
Reed Davis:
Yeah, the right balance will be less than four to one ratio of omega 6 to 3. So these are fatty acids that are essential. You have to have the polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs. And the ratio again, you just take the six divided by the three and that’s your ratio. So if you had a four to one or three to one ratio of 6 to 3 you’re in good shape. People in America walk around with 10, 20, 30 to 1 ratios; this is not good. They say the Western diet’s approximately 15 to one. And we have seen much worse because of the processed foods, which are rich in these vegetable and seed oils. And so testing that can lower your risk for a lot of chronic diseases, but very high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, even cancer, all kinds of inflammatory and autoimmune things. You can reduce your omega 6s by eating less seed oil. But you can’t avoid them completely, because they are in food.
Lindsey:
Right, they’re in meat.
Reed Davis:
So you’ve got to increase your omega 3s and you could do that through fish, seafood or supplementation. I think everyone, and I take two capsules every single morning, little pearls. And I just want to make sure my omega threes are up there.
Lindsey:
So I like the Nordic Naturals ProOmega 2000*. So each one is basically 1000 mg of EPA and DHA in one pill – pretty well balanced. And I find though if people are on two of those a day, that their Omega 6s start getting pushed down. And mind you these are not people who are eating a lot of processed foods, like by the time they find me, these people are already on almost the perfect diet. Most of the people I see they’re already eating all unprocessed food, they’re not . . . you know if they’re going to restaurants, it’s probably higher quality restaurants, or not often. So they’re not eating the processed food, the standard American diet. So I’m trying to figure out what’s the . . . and then I’m telling them okay, if I first see them, I say yeah, so avoid the seed oils. But then it gets to a point where I’m thinking they actually need some more omega 6s. So it’s like, well, should you cook with canola oil every fourth day or you know, what’s the balance?
Reed Davis:
You can get tested, we don’t guess, we test, right? So there’s a good place if you’re having trouble. It’s called Sunbasket.com. And anyone can go to Sunbasket.com and they ship you the food in little bags. You make it yourself. Meals can take 20 minutes or up to half an hour because you still, if it comes with an onion, you still have to chop it. But it’s everything in balance. And it’s all fresh, and it’s all organic. And it’s all pretty balanced in terms of these, no cheap seed oils and things like that – these things go rancid by the way. And they’re just very good. So they’re paleo. You can also get the vegetarian or gluten-free, keto-friendly, Mediterranean-friendly; you can get the pescetarian version and only eat fish if you want. Personally, I like a full broad spectrum of foods and it’s all fresh. So you can get it down to about five bucks a serving. So if you’re cooking it for a family of four, you can have really good meals. The order, remember it comes fresh, not frozen. But they ship it right to your door. You get two or three days’ worth, four days’ worth, five days. You can cook it all at once. And of course cooked food lasts a lot longer in the fridge.
Lindsey:
Cool. hadn’t heard of that one.
Reed Davis:
Your kids can be pulling it out of the fridge in your little containers. We use glass. It’s got a plastic top but it’s glass and you can pop that right in your little micro – we don’t use microwave in our house but we put it in the little oven thing.
Lindsey:
Do they recollect to those glass containers from you or?
Reed Davis:
No, no, it comes in plastic. It comes in bags.
Lindsey:
Oh, you reheat it in glass?
Reed Davis:
What I’m saying is we’re preparing two or three days in a row on say a Sunday. You cook Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday’s meals and you put them in glass and you put them in the fridge and you can pull them out. The kids could if you’ve pre-prepared it, come home from school and eat really good, nutritious food instead of whatever else they might be wanting to eat. You teach them. And plus, they can participate in the making of food. It’s actually pretty meditative. You know, it’s good for you feel like you’ve accomplished something.
Lindsey:
Oh, yeah, I’ve taught my children how to cook. My youngest was making meals for the whole family by I think 13 or 14. He would do one meal a week.
Reed Davis:
Wonderful. Yep. You just need to have seven kids so that you never have to cook!
Lindsey:
Well, we had a down to a science. Well, we had four meals, each of us did one meal a week and then we would go out probably once a week and then leftovers and maybe at a friend’s or something. So it worked out.
Reed Davis:
Yeah, I know. We eat out a little bit more often, but not much.
Lindsey:
Yeah. So if somebody does have a co promised mucosal barrier, from what you can tell, what kind of supplements or approaches would you recommend?
Reed Davis:
Yeah, so we have what we call a DRESS for Health Success System. Matter of fact, I think we could give all your listeners a free booklet on the DRESS for Health Success System if they want. DRESS stands for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation, DRESS. So if you eat right, the right diet for your type, we have a way of figuring it out, diet, and you rest, you know not just sleep, but during the day, if you need to rest your emotions, your mind, whatever you need to do, we teach you some techniques for midday. You know in Italy, they do siestas, because it’s good for your soul, not just because you got up too early. And so diet, rest, and exercise goes without saying. And then the last the two S’s are stress reduction and supplementation. Stress reduction is too big to go into. Now, I’d love to spend a whole show on it sometime. Because it’s so ubiquitous, there’s so many different kinds of stress. And the body doesn’t care what kind, it responds with the stress response, whether it was a mental, emotional, psychospiritual, whether it was bad food, or you got punched in the face, or a car accident, or these chemical stressors like new furniture or something. So you got all these stressors, and you got to handle them, learn about how to sort them out. So you got diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, finally, then supplements would actually have a good chance of helping you when you’re doing other things, right? If you’re trying to supplement your way to health, it’s not going to work. If you try to supplement, you have a bad habit. In other words, well, yeah, I like to eat gluten, you know, I’m allergic to it. But I’m going to take my Gluten-ease – it doesn’t work. So supplements are applied intelligently for the nutritional needs, but also to support for maybe a short period of time, certain systems or organs, or to stimulate, like, if you’re going on a trip, take some immune support with you. Because you’re going to get exposed to bacteria your body might be a little sensitive to. So you can substitute for what’s not in the food anymore. You can stimulate like the immune system, you can support your adrenals or your digestive system. And you can even self-treat with, they’re not really supplements, but they’re available in the same store, self-treatment for parasites or bacteria or fungus or these kinds of things. So there’s four reasons to take supplements.
Lindsey:
And so supplements for a leaky gut? Oh, yeah.
Reed Davis:
So we want to coach to up function. So the gut needs a lot of circulation, it needs some immune support, it needs some soothing, and things. So we want to support the proper function. So there’s all kinds of ingredients for that. I use a product from Biomatrix called Support Mucosa*. What a name, think of that. And it soothes and helps the healing process. But you also need something and maybe coach down the bugs and dysbiosis and the biofilms that might occur. So it just depends what we see in the test results. So Coach up function, coach down the contributors to metabolic chaos, and you’d be in pretty good shape with anything that you’re looking at. We don’t like the word treatment; we like to say support, you know, coach up function. When it comes to the gut, you got to run a test and get rid of the bad foods, they’re irritating. So if you’re going to keep eating the same way, your supplements aren’t going to be as effective. Diet is really a key there. And so is exercise or reduce exercise. People exercise too much, believe it or not. And so there’s lots of ways to look at DRESS, regardless of what the main complaint is, like leaky gut or irritable bowel or migraines or psoriasis, or ADD in kids. I had a kid once, I’ll just tell you a quick story. So with the lady, he comes in the office, and she says “Reed I’m just curious, do you work with children?” I raised four kids, I’ve been coaching football for 15 years, and I work with kids. And she goes no, I mean they’re trying to send my kid home from school if I don’t put him on drugs. They say, back then it was Ritalin, was the drug of choice for bad behavior. And this kid was poking the other kids and disrupting the class and hey, put this kid on drugs. The first thing I said really was, well, was this a medical person at the school, nurse at least? No, just the teachers and principal are diagnosing and recommending treatment to a mom, which I thought was pretty not very good. But I said I don’t know if I could help her out. Let’s run a couple of tests and see. After we got the results, changed some things, by the way this kid was nine, they wanted to drug a nine year old. And the parents were about to do it. Yes, the thing is, well, what do you do? So, you know, they’re desperate. And within three weeks, I’m telling you within three weeks, I got a call, the principal of the school tracked me down and said, you know, Mr. Davis, tracked me down with through the Mom, “this is a different kid”. He’s paying attention. He’s not poking around the other kids. He’s not disrupting classes. He’s actually paying attention. And then he said, “What did you put him on?” We were not getting anywhere with this guy. He just wanted to know what’s the magic pill.
Lindsey:
And what were the big movers for him?
Reed Davis:
The big movers were the food colorings. Some of these foods and food colorings and the sugar and all the crap, the chemicals and preservatives, were neurotoxins to this boy, exciting his nervous system, and he couldn’t come out of sympathetic dominance. For one thing. He also had other irritation, again, the nervous system acts where there’s probably some inflammation and things going on, and some gut issues and stuff like that. We also got him going to bed on time, you know, some disciplinary things. But in three weeks, I got a call “What did we put him on?” I said we’re putting him on a better lifestyle. And he didn’t “well that doesn’t . . .”
Lindsey:
. . . didn’t want to hear about that. Yeah, well, you’ll love this. What I used to do, my previous job, I started a nonprofit in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of DC, and one of the largest and most prestigious school systems in the country, in order to change the school food, it was called Real Food for Kids – Montgomery. And we got them to remove all the artificial colors from the school food.
Reed Davis:
Oh, my goodness, yeah. Well, good for you. And that is a step in the right direction for sure. Hopefully, they got rid of the sugar too.
Lindsey:
Oh, I tried so hard on the sugar, let me tell you, but until the USDA, or the FDA, well, until they change the labels, which they finally did. Now they show the added sugar on labels. That was a key mover because you have to be able to somehow actually track what’s added vs. naturally occurring sugars in order to then say, okay, we want you to limit. But what was happening was, if you added it all up, the kids were getting something like 10 teaspoons of sugar in a typical school breakfast. So like on a bad day, maybe where they served, of course, they served juice, but it had to be all natural juice. So only naturally occurring sugars there, but they would serve of course the flavored milks with added sugar, chocolate and strawberry typically. And then cinnamon roll, and then a pack of Craisins that by itself had five and a quarter teaspoons of added sugar. So that combo. And so they’d already had more than the maximum recommended daily allowance of sugar in their school breakfast already.
Reed Davis:
You know, I totally get it and you’re doing fantastic work. And just another quick one. I had a patient coming into our office who was a principal of five Montessori schools, so five private schools for kids. And she went to one each day that week. And she started sitting in on the disciplinary meetings between parent, teacher and kid. And she just started asking one question of the kid. And the question was, what did you have for breakfast? These were disciplinary, like bad kids, you know, kids doing this or that or whatever, call the parents and try to correct the behavior. And what did you have for breakfast? What percentage do you think was sugary cereal?
Lindsey:
Oh, probably 95%.
Reed Davis:
100%. They’re eating Pop Tarts or Cocoa Puffs or, you know, whatever they’re eating today. I don’t know. But it’s bad. And actually, that was 20 years ago. So isn’t going away, this problem. And if you ask my 93 year old mom, what’s your secret to longevity? She goes, no sugar.
Lindsey:
Good for her. I can’t get my parents to listen to that one.
Reed Davis:
Well, she says that, but then I see a box of chocolates in the freezer.
Lindsey:
Hopefully it’s 70% at least.
Reed Davis:
Yes, she knows about that. She’s still drives for gosh sake. Yeah, she’s funny.
Lindsey:
Okay, one more gut health question. So do you take an anti-microbial approach or something more conservative when it comes to things like SIBO or IMO?
Reed Davis:
It’s just blown up dysbiosis and there’s questions about the source, how’d you get it? But it’s not a test where there’s any kind of speciation whatsoever. They don’t know what the bugs are just plenty of bugs, you know, bacterial overgrowth. So I think it’s really important to dive in little deeper, and you can self-treat, you can, remember what I said, coach up function while you coach down the contributors to metabolic chaos. So, like overgrowth, bacterial, fungal or parasitic and these things, biofilms occur. They develop over time where they all kind of get together in a big orgy and move up and down around inside your small intestines. And they also produce toxins, so lipopolysaccharides, you know, so they’re toxic. And so you have a lot going on. And so to say, what’s the one remedy? No, but coaching down bugs, we call them generally, is a good thing. Chase away the bad guys, while you support the element, the good things in this, the mucosal barrier, the structure and condition of the villi, and in between the little villi, the crypts are called. And there are tests that can tell you how those things are going before, during and after treatment. And as I said, if you’re not eliminating the food sensitivities, you’re missing out on a big opportunity for improvement.
Lindsey:
So tell people where they can find you and find the program?
Reed Davis:
Yes, sure. So well, you know that what we do is called FDN, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. And so we have a website, it’s FDNtraining.com. So if you go to FDMtraining.com/theperfectstool that’s named after your program, then you would get a free booklet. And if they don’t give you a free book, hopefully it gives you something. Okay, we want everyone to learn about the DRESS for Health Success Program, simple steps for health success. Yeah. So you can you can get that book, download it for free.
Lindsey:
And what about you? Do you practice virtually? Or are you in a one set location?
Reed Davis:
No, I have a few hundred people I’ve trained to refer to. So I do that mostly. And I don’t see any one to one anymore. Although, if somebody got a hold of me, I’d give my best shot. The problem is that without the labs, there isn’t much to talk about. From the point of, yeah, there’s just not much to say.
Lindsey:
So if they want to find an FDN practitioner, would they go to that FDNtraining.com?
Reed Davis:
We’re about to add a list. But if they go to that URL, and sign up for the free book, and then follow up to that email, hit reply and say, “Hey, I’m really interested in in hiring an FDN in my area.” And really, we’re in 50 countries, we’re in every state, and at least every time zone and plenty of people to choose from. Right? And they’ll actually try to hook you up with someone whose work . . . so we have FDNs who are personal trainers, say young men 25 to 35, who work in the gym, and they help people get more fit and improve performance. That might not be the same FDN that a postmenopausal woman with weight gain and fatigue and irritable bowel would want to talk to. So we’ll help you pick somebody.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Reed Davis:
A pleasure. Good to be here, Lindsey and if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know, we’re always willing to come back and talk some more.
If you are struggling with bloating, gas, burping, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, soft stool, acid reflux, IBS, IBD, SIBO, candida overgrowth, fatigue or migraines and want to get to the bottom of it, that’s what I help my clients with. You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me. We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my 3- and 5- appointment health coaching programs in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
