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Transcript
- 02:24 About Reed Davis and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition
- 08:43 Hormonal levels during peri-menopause and menopause
- 14:14 Alternative options to prescription drugs for peri-menopause and menopause
- 22:58 The importance of healing the adrenal glands
- 26:10 Hormones and Holistic Healing
- 30:28 DHEA or pregnenolone supplementation
- 36:13 Resting the Adrenals
- 39:30 Synthetic and bio-identical hormone replacement therapies
- 42:21 The D-R-E-S-S for Health Success Lifestyle for balancing hormones
- 47:06 The most pressing health issue in the world today
- 52:16 Where to find Reed Davis
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find this video podcast on WendyLiveto110 and on my website, myersdetox.com. And today, we are going to be talking to Reed Davis, founder of the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Certification Course where you can get your FDN credentials.
We’re going to be specifically talking about how to balance your hormones if you’re a peri-menopausal or a menopausal woman. Most doctors and healthcare practitioners will suggest hormone replacement therapy via synthetic or bio-identical. This is not something I am not a fan of, I am not an advocate of and we’re going to talk about why on this show today.
But first, I have to do our disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this show is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest on this show today.
Reed Davis is a certified nutritional therapist and founder of the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Certification Course as I’ve mentioned. Reed is known as one of the most successful and experienced clinicians in the world today having provided functional lab assessments for over 11,000 clients for hormone levels as well as adrenal function, digestive problems, immune system and detoxification issues as well as testing for infections, infestations of parasites, food sensitivities and many health-related problems.
Reed has served as health director and care manager at the Better Health & Wellness Center in Poway, California for over 15 years and now teaches a course in functional medicine with over 1500 trainees in 50 countries. He’s also a clinical adviser at BioHealth Laboratory where he helps doctors interpret lab tests about treating different symptoms rather than treating different symptoms. Reed lives in Southern California teaching the FDN Certification Course and helping his graduates to build robust private pay practices.
So Reed, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Reed Davis: Thank you so much. That’s a wonderful introduction, Wendy. It’s a real pleasure to be with you. I’m happy to help any way I can.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about you and how you became so interested and passionate about diagnosis through lab testing and developing the FDN Certification Course?
Reed Davis: Thanks a million. I’ll try not to go into too much detail because it’s really an exciting story. I actually came out of the field of environmental law. So I’ve been studying for many years, I worked in that area, how bad the environment was. I just came to change careers, kind of job change thing and I wanted to help people who I knew were sick.
I thought it would just be like a corporate wellness kind of like I’ll work for companies as a consultant and help employees get healthy and then they’ll be more productive. Well, in turns out that it’s actually quite complicated, not as easy as I thought it was going to be. So I had to go back to school and learned about some nutrition. And so I got a certification in nutrition.
I was working at a wellness center and the doctors there let me talk to every single patient that came in. So I got this amazing amount of experience trying to help people walking in the door who had health problems and I was the nutritionist. So I thought nutritional therapy was going to be what fixed them in addition to whether they were getting chiropractic or acupuncture or whatever the other things were at this wellness center.
Now, what I found out in a very short period of time was that the typical nutrition therapy or just nutrition alone wasn’t getting to the root of the problem. And really, I just started to feel like I was just a supplement salesman. So the way I was trained in nutrition and so many nutritional therapist were trained this way and other health coaches and people and even personal trainers and all these really good, well-intentioned people, but it’s not just about supplements. So people would have adrenal fatigue, they’d just be tired all the time. They weren’t sleeping. They were maybe moody or irritable, sinuses, allergies. They just digestive issues, joint pain. Whatever it was walking in the door, I wanted to help them and nutrition therapy wasn’t getting deep enough.
Now, I just thank God that I ran to the right people who were in the early stages of this functional medicine movement. So I started way back 15 years ago running some lab work. And it just so happened that I started running hormone tests. That was my first kind of testing that I was really getting good at, really doing a high volume of.
And to reach that, by the way, besides running this clinic, I was out in the public doing screening. I was doing bone density testing. That was a very successful eight years of doing. Every week, I’m doing bone density testing in like Whole foods and Sprouts and Henry’s Market, these places with the cool vitamin and mineral department thing. So I got very popular in southern California. I worked 30 different stores for eight years doing it.
Now, obviously, what’s the demographic? You’re going to run into women who are getting their bones tested because they don’t want to have osteoporosis when they get even older. So I was working with 40- to 60-year old, maybe more like 45- to 55-year olds, so that perfect demographic where, “Hey, you’re curious about your bones, now you want to also look at hormones because hormones are a huge part of bone density issues.”
So my background is that I came out of environmental law, went into nutrition and was a case manager at a wellness center doing nutrition on every person walking in and had a really successful screening business. So I just got to do a very, very high volume of this early laboratory work.
Again, selling supplements wasn’t satisfactory. No one was doing it long enough for it to work. And so I had to find out something. So I started running these labs on all these women, mostly hormone testing at first. And so I learned how to balance hormones naturally if you will.
Back then, there really wasn’t a lot of natural hormone therapy or bio-identical. It was all like, “Here’s your Premarin. Here’s your Premarin.” And so there was a study that came out in 2001 that said that’s not a good thing anymore. And so all these women in 2001 – I mean, millions of women and their doctors were like, “Well now, what do we do?”
The government actually shut down an 8-year study after five years because the risk, the cardiovascular disease and the cancer and the blot clots and all the things that were happening because of this medication were out-weighting the few benefits you would get.
And actually, it did help with the bones a little bit and really, symptoms of menopause like hot flushes and things like that. But again, there’s all the risk. So they just quit selling this drug pretty much and no one knew what to do. So the guys that I worked with, the physicians, we were kind of in the cutting-edge of doing saliva testing and hormones and then natural therapies to see if we can’t get to the root of that imbalance that they were suffering from.
And I have to say this, that the environment and the amount of stress that people were under has only gotten worse since back then. So since that study came out in 2001, if you think about it 13 years ago that we’ve been working on this and hopefully, I can help people. I can certainly answer questions about where they should go from there.
But that’s my background. And then you mentioned the course. Six years ago, after I created this very successful model of investigation – first, investigate, investigate. What are the root causes of hormone imbalances or digestive issues or problems with the immune system or liver and detoxification issues? Those things are at the root of a lot of health complaints today. And so I learned not only to do the hormone testing, but all the other labs that we now do and that I teach in my certification course. And so yeah, it’s been very interesting. We’re doing a lot of good in the world and we’re having a lot of fun doing it.
Wendy Myers: Well so, in all these years of doing all these testing, what are some of the common denominators in the hormonal levels of peri-menopausal and menopausal women?
Reed Davis: Fantastic question! First of all, natural menopause, real menopause is just the cessation of the menstrual cycle. So it means you’re not going to be able to have babies anymore. And it should be – the CDC says that it happens at age 51. So 51 is supposed to be the average age of the cessation of menstruation and you’re not going to have babies anymore.
It should just sort of go away, “Oh, you’re not going to bleed anymore.” It should be, “Oh, I’m 50. I missed a period. Oh, boy! I missed two” and then you miss six and then actually, you’ve missed 12 in a row, you’re not going to get anymore menstrual cycles. You’re “post-menopausal”. So it’s supposed to be this natural, organic process and just fact of life and it really shouldn’t give you very many problems.
The most common symptom when you see menstruation in normal, natural menopause is you have a few hot flushes. And that’s simply your brain, the hypothalamus, pituitary, the brain has started sending out a signal to the ovaries, “Hey! Where’s that estrogen? You’re not producing estrogen.” So the ovaries are done, they’re not going to produce estrogen like they used to ripen an egg and release it anymore. That’s over with.
So the brain is sort of missing it. It’s like a thermostat and your brain says, “Hey, where’s the estrogen? Where’s the estrogen?” So it will crank up what’s called ‘follicle stimulating hormone’ and that’s a vasodilator. It makes the little capillaries under your skin dilate and so your core temperature comes up to the surface and you feel and hot sweaty. It can give you night sweats and be very uncomfortable.
That’s the only symptom that should be associated with menopause that would be considered just a normal reaction. Now, the problem is that women are now feeling that way at not 51, but at 41 and at 39. So what I’m noticing in the population today is that women are going through very early menopausal symptoms.
Now, they would go to their physician and they’ll say, “Well, you’re only 39… you’re 42… you’re 43… you can’t be going through menopause yet. That doesn’t happen until you’re 50-soemthing. So let’s just give you something for the symptoms.” Again, some of these medications are very helpful. They will relieve the discomfort of hot flushes and night sweats and vaginal dryness. And then there’s the moodiness and the irritability. And then there’s the things that your hair start – you’re actually aging before your time.
So there’s that way to deal with it. And by the way, there’s even some natural supplements that people could take. There’s lots of stuff on the shelves and I don’t endorse any particular product because I just don’t associate myself that way. I want to be completely independent. So there’s medication you could take for relief of the symptoms or there are natural products you could take for relief of the symptoms, but that’s never been good enough for me. Again, I don’t want o be a vitamin salesman.
And so, what I learned to do was look at the underlying causes and conditions that are bringing on that early menopause. Now, this should be no surprise to you, Wendy. It’s chronic stress. Almost everything we’re facing today that’s not an infectious disease or you fall down and break a bone or something, it’s chronic stress-related dysfunction and degeneration of the body. We’re aging earlier now.
And there’s, again, two ways to handle it. Western, modern medicine has gotten very, very good at handling symptoms. There’s a prescription or everything. If that doesn’t work, there’s always surgery. We’re the masters of surgery. We can just chop the part off. So that to me is not natural. I don’t want to go that way. And most of our interested community, they don’t want to go that way either. They actually are now turning around and saying, “Well, is there something I can do. I’m willing to take responsibility. I want to know why am I having these and is there something I can do?” And of course, over all these years, I’ve come up with a number of sort of a step-by-step solution to just about every chronic stress-related disorder.
And so, first, we go through the list. You’ve got your peri-menopausal and menopausal symptoms even though you’re only 42 or 44 years old (or even younger today). But you’ve also got the headaches, the migraines, the sinuses, the allergies, the moodiness, irritability, the fatigue and we didn’t mention it, lots of sleep problems and things like that and you feel like crap.
So people, their bodies are breaking down. They’ve got all these dysfunction. It’s what I call ‘metabolic chaos’, the body is just not working the way it’s supposed to. We can look at and sort of straighten out what all those are things that are contributing to metabolic chaos and then use the natural ability and desire of the body to be healthy and coach that up so to speak.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And that’s exactly what I experienced when I was 39. I just had a baby. I felt terrible. I was exhausted. I was crabby. I just thought, “What in the heck is wrong with me?” I couldn’t lose weight. I was working out eight hours a week and all that stuff.
So I went to my ND, my naturopathic doctor. Same thing. They did all the testing. Low testosterone, I had the estrogen levels of a menopausal woman, low progesterone, estrogen dominance, blah-blah-blah. And of course, I was just given thyroid hormones and hormone replacement therapy as a suggestion. I thought, “You know what? I’m 39. I’m not going on hormone replacement therapy.” So what are some options that women can use today instead of just doing what their doctor says and taking that prescription that they write?
Reed Davis: Well, first of all, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to say that that’s a big difference between what I teach in our functional nutrition course. We call it ‘functional diagnostic nutrition’. We don’t want to call it ‘medicine’ because most of us are not medical practitioners. So we call it ‘functional diagnostic’. So we use labs, but we don’t use them the same way licensed physicians use them just like what happened to you.
You can go to your practitioner and then they might just listen and you tell them you have certain symptoms and they go, “Oh, here’s something for that symptom.” Now, the next level is that they’ll run a test, but they will run that test generally based on the symptoms.
So let’s say you present to your physician and you’re complaining that your hair is thinning, your extremities are cold (icy cold sometimes), you have constipation, you’re fatigued all the time and you’re gaining weight that you can’t lose. Well, that sounds like it might be thyroid. Thyroid controls metabolism. It sounds like the metabolism has slowed down, so let’s run a test on the thyroid.
So they’re looking at symptoms, running a test based on symptoms. And then what happens? Sure enough, we pat ourselves on the back. We found your problem is low thyroid and here’s your prescription. That may actually alleviate some symptoms and that’s never a bad thing. But no one is saying, “Well, I’m only 39. Why is my thyroid low? What’s the cause? Is there something I can do myself? I’d be willing to behave differently if you told me what I need to do.”
So that’s where we go. We don’t just run a test based on symptoms and then treat the paper. So you could see what I’m saying. If you have low thyroid and you just write a prescription, you’re treating the test results, not the person. And so you’re artificially just saying, “Look, here’s a marker here. We’re going to give you something to bring it back up into range. And then we’ll check you every couple of months and we’ll [inaudible 00:17:00]. In other words, adjust the amount of medication to keep you in that range.” They’re treating the paper and you might actually feel a little bit better.
But if you don’t deal with those underlying causes and conditions, then the thyroid will even get worse and then they’ll just have to up your medication. So they’re still going to be treating the paper or new symptoms will appear. So it might be, “Here’s some other.” And if you take the same approach, “Well, there’s another medication.” That’s why we find people in eight, nine different medications. That, to us, is completely unacceptable.
Now, you ask, “What would you do instead?” I do run some labs, but I look at basic pillars of health pretty much in every person. I do look at the hormones. I do look at the immune system. We do look at digestion, the assimilation of nutrients. And then also, we look for liver function, detoxification function and things like that to make sure you’re just working with. You need these pillars of health – hormone, immune, digestion, elimination and detoxification, these things.
So now, we’ve got some leverage. We’ve got some areas, “Oh, look! You need improvement here.” That is not diagnosis and treatment of a specific condition. It’s really just non-specific treatment of everything. That’s how the body works.
Wendy Myers: Yes! Yes. That’s what I agree with. The whole body work as a system. You can’t just treat the thyroid or treat the adrenals or treat this. It doesn’t work that way. Everything is interrelated. That’s what I love about your program.
Reed Davis: Well, thank you. And so what does it mean that the person gets to do? So once we identify some healing opportunities – again, not diagnose and treatment of anything specific, but here’s an area, “Look, your liver is congested. You want to start to improve that. And then your immune system is involved because you’ve got irritation and inflammation in your gut. So we need to get to the source of that and eliminate that. Oh, by the way, you’ve got overgrowth of bad bacteria and even some parasites and you’ve got some food sensitivities and you’ve got…”
Now, we are the guys that have developed the system that sorts that out for you. We just gave you healing opportunities, we identified those. And then of course, you have to understand that the healing process is that, it’s a process. So you need someone that’s good at coaching about a step-by-step, where to start, what the goals are and how to adjust along the way. So we have (and you could hold up your hand and label your fingers) D-R-E-S-S. That’s diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplementation. Now it really is as simple as that. That will help you heal every chronic stress related condition.
Anything that isn’t diet-related, resting, sleeping properly, exercising and then the last one goes under stress reduction. So we find with our labs those hidden stressors, hidden dysfunction, things like food sensitivities and bacterial overgrowth and parasites and things and there’s metals. There’s lots of other stressors that are completely hidden from you and we help you sort out whether they’re in the environment or the food that you’re eating and these kind of things.
So for diet, we get you eating perfect for your genetic type. We have a test that would tell us genetic requirements. Not everyone is designed to eat a lot of protein or a lot of fat. Eskimos do great on 95% fat and protein. And then there’s tribes in South America that eat about 95% carbohydrates. Well, where do you fall in there?
We actually have a test that would give us a starting place and a good idea. We also could test for food sensitivities and make sure you’re not eating that. So we make sure you’re eating right. Now we also have a test that tells us whether you’re actually digesting and absorbing and assimilating those nutrients. So diet is important. Rest is so incredibly important. People just don’t sleep enough. They’re up in the middle of the night. It really causes a lot of problems. Your brain can’t detoxify, your whole body really if you’re not sleeping properly. Now, that sounds simple enough, so we could probably move on to exercise.
Some people over-exercise. Some people under-exercise. The thing to remember is that there are behavior requirements to improving your health. If you really want to get healthy, you’ve got to make some changes and you need some coaching and you need some step-by-step. So what FDN is truly is this diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction (including all those hidden stressors) and some supplementation and it’s guided by the lab work.
A lot of people with holistic lifestyle plans, there’s a lot of personal trainers and there’s a lot of diet (people with diets, you could follow nutritionists and things) and there’s some other modalities that might help you (there’s chiropractic and acupuncture and things). But they may not be using labs at all, they may not be using the right labs that identify the areas that need improvement. And of course, we’re also experts at the step-by-step coaching.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Reed Davis: …and giving you honest feedback, getting honest feedback and adjusting the program because there’s no one supplement that’s going to do the same thing for every person, there’s no one diet that’s going to do the same thing for every person. There’s no one exercise program that should be the same. Everything needs to be made for you. And so that’s what we do. We have a holistic lifestyle plan, the D-R-E-S-S for Health Success Program, but it’s totally customized for each individual based on their history, their complaints and their lab test. And then there’s a coaching process that requires some honest effort and progress and we can adjust it along the way.
Wendy Myers: And so that definitely sounds like a program that will health the adrenal glands, which make all of our hormones or estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. So why is it important to be able to heal the adrenal glands in order to correct someone’s hormone levels?
Reed Davis: Well, the adrenal glands, they’re taking a lot of blame these days because they are the stress glands, they do make cortisol and adrenaline. And so when you are in a fight/flight mode – and we are a lot. We’re just overly sympathetic dominant. We get in fight/flight all the time. We’re driving through traffic, we’re answering phones, we’re seeing junk on TV, we’ve got kids, we’ve got financial, we’ve got all these kinds of stress from the outside world. But we also have a lot of hidden stress. Again, if you have food sensitivities and parasites and yeasts and bacterial overgrowth and maybe some metals and other environmental toxins and things, all of those are chronic stressors we’re talking about and the adrenals are getting the blame for a lot of what’s going wrong in your body.
I don’t place as much emphasis on the adrenals as some people because there’s other organs in the – it’s called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axes.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah.
Reed Davis: So you have organs in your brain that are kind of directing traffic, but the adrenals are getting a lot of blame. Nonetheless, you do need to support the adrenals in most people and look at cortisol levels to see if they’re high or low and figure out why.
They also make DHEA, which is the parent of estrogen and testosterone. And that’s why the adrenals are so important I guess on that sex hormone level. So they make DHEA, dehydrated andrenosterone, which breaks down in men mostly in the testosterone and women mostly in estrogen. Now, this is a perfect example, Wendy of why if you have low testosterone symptoms for men or women and all you do is go, “Oh, look! Testosterone is low. Here’s your testosterone,” you’re really not considering what testosterone made out of and is there’s something affecting that. And so that’s why we take our whole chronic stress-related approach.
It’s really holistic approach. It’s not a patch and it works for me and it works for women, whether it’s testosterone or estrogen. Remember, they’re just the children of these DHEA. And that’s the child of pregnenolone. So now, we’re getting to the bigger picture and we’re seeing that stress can screw the whole thing up if you will.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Reed Davis: And I’ve got all the charts and diagrams and things. We do teach our practitioners and we teach our clients how this actually works so that they’re very empowered to take the right steps to follow the behavior requirements because we didn’t just pop some pills. Sure, we do supplements, but I don’t have a brand name. I don’t own a penny’s worth of stock. I don’t do MLM (multi level marketing). I don’t do anything like that. I have my favorite stuff, which I teach people about, but it doesn’t matter to me where you buy. You can go down the corner store and get most of them.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us the importance of some of the hormones in the body and why we need to heal the entire body in order to get them functioning properly?
Reed Davis: Yeah, perfect! Well, obviously, you want to talk about the sex hormones I think because the subject of the show is menopause and peri-menopause…
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes.
Reed Davis: …because we can talk about the thyroid for a couple of hours. That’s really important. It controls metabolism. But with the sex hormones, take testosterone for instance, that’s responsible for your sex drive and muscle tone and energy levels and clear thinking and brain activity and stuff like that. Those are pretty important things to be a happy person and to be a functioning person in society – hold a job, pay your bills, raise your kids, do all the fun stuff that we get to do and grandkids now, all these wonderful stuff. So testosterone is really important to have good, wholesome, natural levels.
Now, the sister to that would be estrogen. Men are more dominant in testosterone although women need it for those same things. With estrogen, if you have too low of estrogen levels, you’re going to have vaginal dryness, painful intercourse, you could have thinning skin, your hair is falling out, you’re moody, irritable, fatigued, you could have breast pain. You could have a lot of discomfort around that too.
And again, there’s ways to patch it up. I don’t even mind if someone does that. It’s okay to take the supplement if it’s a natural supplement to help out a little bit, to make you feel better. That’s called ‘relief care’ and that’s okay. But if you keep in mind that those are just the children of DHEA (that’s the sort of parent) and that comes from another hormone called pregnenolone, that’s – And pregnenolone, by the way, is made out of fat (actually, the so-called ‘bad cholesterol’ and B vitamins). We have hormones being made as master hormone making DHEA, which gets slid into sort of either testosterone or estrogen depending on which one you’re dominant in.
Well, if that’s all that pregnenolone had to do (turn into DHEA and these two male and female hormones), it’d be great. But pregnenolone, this master hormone, now this is where I hope – again, I don’t have the diagram in front of me. I hope you can see this. Pregnenolone also makes progesterone. It can slide off into the progesterone, cortisol pathway. Now, cortisol is the stress hormone, right? So if cortisol goes up due to stress, you’ll end up stealing the pregnenolone and DHEA will go down and your testosterone/estrogen will go down.
So what I just showed you is how stress, which raises cortisol will steal the master hormone and you won’t have enough left to make your sex hormones. That’s called the ‘pregnenolone steal’. Now, I’ve argued this thing for ten years as to how real that is. There are some people who don’t buy it, but I’ve seen it work over and over and over again in our practice where when we start to reduce the stressors and get cortisol and people sort of back to normal in terms of how they’re dealing with their stress, whether it be mental or emotional or what’s much better is finding those hidden stressors, when you start eating better and resting and you’re taking the supplements to balance your body and give it its nutrition, when you get rid of the parasites, bacteria, funguses, viruses, when you get rid of food sensitivities, you start cleaning your body up real well, well, stress level goes down and things start to return to normal.
So again, I’m not against using a little snatch of stuff here to up your testosterone and estrogen levels and balancing those a little bit to get through the hump. But when you start really following behavior that addresses all your chronic stressors, it’s amazing how much your life improves and things go back to normal. And you did it all without taking a prescription drug, which has many bad side effects and obviously not where our audience wants to go.
Wendy Myers: Are you a fan of DHEA or pregnenolone supplementation?
Reed Davis: Again, that’s a jump starter. And yes, I use that a lot. We call those ‘program enhancers’. And so rather than do hormone replacement, which is, “Testosterone is low. Here’s your pill or patch” or whatever, “Oh, estrogen is low. Here’s your pill or patch or lozenge” or whatever, see those actually don’t address the hierarchy. They don’t address the stressor. They’re really just symptom relief.
And so, again, I said a little bit of symptom relief isn’t bad, but what we find is a little more – first of all, it’s over-the-counter for the most part. So it’s much easier to do in different countries. We have practitioners in 50 countries. We have to be very sensitive to, “We can’t get those prescriptions” because estrogen and testosterone prescription medications, But we can still get the precursors.
Again, here’s testosterone, estrogen, here’s the DHEA and here’s the pregnenolone, those are called ‘pro hormones’. You can actually take some of those. You can get oils that will be absorbed into your skin. You can get pills you could take. They do go through the liver. But you can take sublinguals that go directly into the bloodstream.
And so you’re kind of letting your body deal with it. For men, the DHEA and the pregnenolone would go to the testes where it’s going to get turned into testosterone. Women also make a little testosterone in the adrenal glands. But in women, the ovary should be able to turn that stuff into estrogen, raise it up a little bit. So that often is enough for relief.
Wendy Myers: Is there a danger? Say if you take pregnenolone, it’ll turn into a hormone that you don’t want like, say, it can make some DHEA, but it can also turn into more progesterone that you don’t need? Is there any danger of that thing?
Reed Davis: Well, it will convert into progesterone as well, but that tends to be very protective. This is why progesterone therapy is so popular is because it makes you feel better. It’s a diuretic. You can lose some water weight. It’s relaxing. We always have our clients take it before bedtime because it can help you sleep.
And it will help you boost low cortisol too. the progesterone will turn into cortisol and cortisone, which are helpful. They are good for keeping blood sugar levels up and they’re anti-inflammatory and they kill and things like that. So progesterone is very, very helpful. There’s also a backdoor shunt where progesterone turns into another pro hormone called ‘androstenedione’, which feeds into testosterone and then eventually into estrogen. So progesterone is a cool thing.
You just wouldn’t want to overdo it. And I wouldn’t be very concerned about someone taking too much pregnenolone. Pregnenolone will convert into progesterone and then that goes down into other areas too. That’s the other branch of the tree. You’d be hard-pressed to take enough pregnenolone to raise your progesterone towards too high.
We’ve seen people with quite high levels of progesterone. We’re actually doing very well. There is a situation where you could super saturation of progesterone and that could cause fatigue.
As a matter of fact, I have a bottle right here of progesterone and it’s a little oil. You can put it on your skin. I actually use it. Men can use it too. You can put it a little bit of that oil right here and you rub your arms together and it’ll dry. This is also an edible oil, so you could eat it and it actually gets absorbed into the lymph system. And so just a few drops can be very helpful.
Reed Davis: Pregnenolone can be very helpful.
Wendy Myers: So you’re okay with supplementing the progesterone, but not estrogen or testosterone?
Reed Davis: Well, those are a little harder to get for one thing. Those are more directly related to relief care. These other ones, if you will, will sort of prime the pump and maybe help re-establish the pathways that have been screwed up by too much stress. So if you can reduce the stress and take some of these things to start of jump start the manufacture of these things in a more natural way, that’s what we call kickstarting or jumpstarting. You could call it ‘priming the pump’ with some of these nice pro hormones rather than just slapping on the big daddy, the testosterone or estrogen.
Estrogen, you have to be very careful with. Some of it is carcinogenic. Depending on how it gets metabolized, there’s estrone, estrodiol, estriol. They break down in the body hopefully in a good way. Some of them can actually be carcinogenic. So you got to get the testing done before you do any of that. I would not suggest anyone go to the store even though you can in the U.S. (you can go to the store and buy these things). Without proper testing and guidance, I don’t think I would do it for very long.
I mean, people go out and try stuff, “I just need to feel better. I just need to feel better.” So they’re hungry and they go and talk to a clerk and he’s like, “Yeah, try this” and then they might get lucky and it worked a little bit. But then the symptoms are going to come back or appears new symptoms if you aren’t really on a program with overall health, wellness and taking a holistic approach.
Wendy Myers: Well, that kind of lays into my next question. I just want to know what your opinion is and the school of thought that says taking supplemental hormone replacement rests the adrenals so that they could heal. What do you think about that?
Reed Davis: Well, I believe in adrenal support, I’m more into the B vitamins and some of the adaptogenic herbs. They tend to make you feel better while you work on the lifestyle thing. There’s nothing wrong with taking that support.
I think the way I do it, Wendy is I say, “Let’s get the nutritional support and the vitamins and maybe some herbs and work on the lifestyle, reducing those stressors” – I mean, look, if you’ve got parasites and bacteria and yeast and you’ve got metals and environmental toxins in your body, you’re not doing any good really until you address those things. You could be drinking bad water. You could be sleeping on toxic sheets, flame retardants in your pajamas, I don’t know. There’s all these things. I know airline people are subjected to these flame retardants that are absolutely horrible for your body and your brain and your nervous system and everything.
So anyway, what I’m trying to say is if you’re not reducing the stress, identifying clearly and reducing those stressors and the damage they’ve done to your immune system, detoxification system, digestion, hormone glands like the adrenals, you really have to take this whole approach. So just to run some adrenal support on someone might actually make them feel a little better for a week or two or six, but then what?
That’s what I ran into 15 years ago. Man, I was still on the best adrenal support you can get your hands on – glandular with the B complexes and the herbal stuff that actually, “Hey! I feel like…” – again, maybe that little rest and you’re getting some energy back, but it’s just a short lift. And you have people today who run a lab and say, “Buy my supplements. Here, run this lab. Buy my supplements.” And guess what? You’re asking me, “How do you feel?” “I feel pretty good. I’m feeling better.” But ask them in six months and it’s like, “Argh, I’m back to the way I used to feel.” So I don’t like that approach.
So I would say start with the B and C, those B complex and C vitamins. The glandular are pretty cool. Some of these, I’ve actually gone to rhodiola and ginseng. These kind of things will help you feel better. And then if you like that and you’re working on your lifestyle and you’re eating better and you’re sleeping better and you’re exercising properly and doing these and you like where it’s going, we call the pro hormones.
If you want to use some DHEA and pregnenolone and even some progesterone, well those are the program enhancers. That’s how I look at it. But then, the big daddies, testosterone and estrogen, we rarely use them. We find that we don’t have to in most people.
Wendy Myers: And so what do you think about the safety of bio-identical versus synthetic hormone replacement therapy. There’s a lot of women out there that feel like because they’re not taking synthetic hormones, they’re thinking, “Oh, I’m taking bio-identical,” they have this false sense of security that they’re taking something very safe, I believe. Can you explain that a little bit?
Reed Davis: Well, certainly, I would go that way if I was going to do hormone replacement. I would never take Premarin because it’s made from horse pee…literally. Premarin stands for pregnant + mare + urine. That’s what it’s made of. And there’s other kinds of synthetic hormones as well whether it’s testosterone or progesterone. There’s synthetic everything. So those are absolutely in my opinion to be avoided. Talk to your doctor about getting on BHRT, bio-identical. We used to call it ‘NHRT’, ‘natural hormone replacement therapy’. But you’re still just replacing the hormone, you’re not dealing with the root causes of conditions and chronic stressors – not enough in an effective way.
Now, if you’re suffering from severe hot flushes, night sweats and vaginal dryness, you can’t tell that person, “Oh, you got to wait six months.” They’ll go down the street and get something from someone else. So you use the very least amount for the shortest period of time to get a little relief. We call that ‘intelligent allopathy’, symptom relief just for now as long as you’re willing to do all the behavioral. Again, the D-R-E-S-S Program.
So if you commit to my D-R-E-S-S Program, you know, let us do our intake with the labs, commit to the D-R-E-S-S Program, let’s get you on these behavior building step-by-step system, a little relief care is just fine. So that’s my honest opinion as long as you’re using the natural stuff. That’s how I do it.
But it raises the issue of is that what someone is telling you’re doing. Nowadays, everyone started to jump on the bandwagon. The compounding pharmacies who 15 years ago, now there’s a thousand of them. Why? Because they identified a marketplace. They go, “Oh, women don’t want to take Premarin anymore,” they scrambled around for a few years, “Okay, we’re all going to sell…” These are the same guys who were selling Premarin 15 years ago. Now, they’re just selling natural. Why? Because that’s what the market is demanding. For what? For relief care. They’re sort of just hammering on, “Yup, testosterone is low, here’s some natural testosterone” or estrogen or whatever it is.
So I don’t believe in that, just sticking with the relief care. I hope that came across okay.
Wendy Myers: No, that’s perfect. That’s perfect.
Reed Davis: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners three action steps that they can take today to start healing their body and balancing their hormones?
Reed Davis: Yeah, I think the big ones for me are diet – you know, aside from relief care. So pretend for a minute that that person that you’re talking about has taken some stuff or doing some stuff they know takes the edge off of their symptoms. That could mean trying a couple of different products. And certainly, we know some things that will work very well for people.
So if you can get the edge off where you can focus on your lifestyle, you would start with – usually, it’s hydrating your body every morning and making sure you eat a good breakfast and a good lunch and a good dinner and get that diet really perfect. There’s a way actually to find out what’s the right amount of protein and fat and carbohydrates for you. Remember, if you give an Eskimo a South American Indian’s diet, he’s going to get sick and die guaranteed. And if you put that South American Indian who’s eaten 95% carbohydrates, you put him on an Eskimo diet, he’s going to die.
So there’s actually a way to find out what your genetic requirements are in terms of proteins, fat and carbohydrates and eliminating all the – we know what junk is. Certain foods are bad for everybody and doing these sort of things.
So when you start doing that, hydrating your body, eating the right amount of protein, fat and carbs, the right ones, the right meats, the right kinds of proteins, fats and carbs, it helps you straight yourself up. First of all, just having more energy is amazing from that. Having a better mood, which comes from that is very good and having a satiation (not craving things). So if you can get up every morning well-rested, hydrate your body and eat the exact, perfect diet that’s going to give you energy, give you a sense of well-being and make sure you’re not craving anything, obviously, until lunch you’re going to be hungry, that’s an amazing thing right there. So the D alone is the first thing.
And then of course you want to have a good poop, you know?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Reed Davis: Elimination is really important. So when you do that alone, your life can change.
Now, again, I said ‘after a good night sleep’. So rest is really critical. There’s a thing that we teach called ‘sleep hygiene’, making sure the TV is off, doing a little quiet time and turning your body down. You don’t want to go to sleep when you’re all pumped up.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Reed Davis: So there’s lots of sleep hygiene things. And then the exercise is absolutely critical. We’re meant to move. Move is medicine in and of itself. You can’t detox your body if you’re not taking exercise. You know that I have this nice shirt on, but I’m actually wearing sweats because I just came from the gym, right? You saw them. And so you got to get to the gym or somewhere to do some exercise.
Wendy Myers: Get your blood moving.
Reed Davis: Now, when it comes to that stress reduction – so I’m giving you five things. you asked for three.
Wendy Myers: Only three!
Reed Davis: Okay, only three.
Wendy Myers: I’m just joking.
Reed Davis: But these are like my children. You’re saying, “Which one of the diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplement, which one you would chop off?” See, if you only did three, you’d only be doing 60% of the program, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Reed Davis: Stress reduction is huge. You got to get rid of people in your life who suck or get rid of the parasites or bugs, things like that. Food sensitivities are huge. That kind of ties into the diet one. All these things that are stressing you, we can help you with it.
And then supplements are important. Food just isn’t good enough anymore. There’s no nutrients left in the soil. Even organic doesn’t have enough nutrients. The reason you eat organic is because it’s free of pesticides and herbicides. So you’re reducing stress by eating organic food. That’s a stress reduction thing, “Hey, quit eating food with chemicals and pesticides and herbicides.” That’s a cool thing right there, but there’s still not enough nutrients in the food. And so we need to take some supplements.
Sometimes they help stimulate organs, they can help support the general function, you need nutrients and those kind of things. So I can’t give you three. I have to give you five.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Bad question, sorry.
Reed Davis: Nah, that’s okay.
Wendy Myers: So I have another question. What do you think in your opinion is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Reed Davis: Oh, man! Well, there’s that one side of it like Ebola is pretty ridiculous. It’s causing a lot of upsets these days. I think it’s chronic stress. Like I said, chronic stress-related disorders are what are killing us. They’re why the next generation isn’t going to live as long as mine.
I’m an early baby boomer born in 1953. And so I actually grew up on farm food, pulling carrots up on the ground and just rinsing them off, eating the dirt that’s on them basically.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I was doing too.
Reed Davis: And so I have longevity. I have aunties that live to be a hundred – 98, 96, stuff like that. But I fear for my kid who’s 32 and his kids. That generation is going to die younger because of chronic stress mostly from food, environment and those kinds of things.
That’s kind of my answer. I wasn’t ready for that question. But chronic stress-related disorders, the chemicals in our food – remember, I came out of environmental law. That is what I study. It’s bad. There’s 80,000 chemicals in the environment, only a few, relative few, a few hundred – even if it was a couple of thousand of them actually had been tested for safety, well who’s testing the other 80,000? We’re the test. We’re the rats being exposed to it and, “Well, let’s see what happens.”
Well, what’s happening, you’re seeing in the chronic obesity (that’s a major epidemic especially in kids), cancer, diabetes (because of the amount of sugar we eat) and heart disease. I mean, those are the thing. It’s cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity. It’s killing people and it’s so prevalent. I don’t want to just b on a stump here too much.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s why it’s so important to detox because it doesn’t matter how good your diet is or your exercise or you rest enough, if you don’t detox, you are not going to have the health that you think you’re going to be producing with those lifestyle aspects. You have to run the whole gamut.
I have so many clients that they live a very, very healthy lifestyle and they aren’t well by the time they’re 35 or 40+ because they’re not paying attention to detoxification and getting rid of these 80,000+ chemicals. That’s scary.
Reed Davis: Well, it can be overwhelming if you don’t have a plan and a way of dealing with it and a wherewithal. I mean, some people just can’t put anything together in their lives. It’s harder for some than others. You got to have that desire. I think when you get older – you know, I’m at an age when it’s my primary concern, staying healthy and active. I want a good sharp mental ability and physical ability to do things I did when I was younger and try to keep that for long.
You’re the 110-year program, right?
Wendy Myers: Yes, let’s hope, let’s hope. I like that.
Reed Davis: I read a book by a doctor at UCLA I think called The 120-year Diet. This was way back when I first got into this. I really bought into a lot of that, that the anti-aging movement should be teaching people that it’s not about not getting older, but it’s about you get up to about 40 and then typically, in today’s society, you get the 40, you start to go down, 50 and 60, you start to really go down and then you die in bad shape. That’s what’s happening. With drugs, you can probably stretch that out a little bit.
But really, what the book taught me was that you should get to about 40, be in really good shape and stay that way, kind of a flat line until about 80. You should be able to spend 40 years as a 40-year old. It doesn’t get to be 70 and stay that. No, you want to stay 40 until you’re about 80. And then you could – you know, life turmoil. We’re designed to die.
But you should be able to stay – if you’re anywhere over 40, you should stay 40 until you’re really old. And that’s how I look at anti-aging. No matter what I do, I can’t go back to the anabolic state I was as a 22-year old. That will never happen. But here I am at 61 and if I can stay 39 or 40 for another twenty years, I’m going to be a happy guy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, Reed, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was great. Very inspiring, informational, a lot of good tips to help people improve balancing their hormones and their health.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about your FDN Program and more about where people can find you?
Reed Davis: Well, thanks a million. I am available by phone at 858-842-3266. I actually do pick up my phone if I’m not already on it or working on a project here on my computer and I have an amazing staff of about 20 people because we teach practitioners around the world how to do this work. You said 1500, I’m sure we’re well over 1700 practitioners now.
Wendy Myers: Wow.
Reed Davis: …that are taking the course or have already graduated and have successful FDN practices. So I teach a model of – again, we could call it ‘care’. It’s a self-care model and people opt in to it because you don’t have to do it. No one has to go see an FDN practitioner. We’re trying to keep you from having to go se a doctor, that’s the deal.
So we have the self-care opt-in model. I teach people how to do the lab work, what the protocols are, how to really understand it. It’s an amazing program, full of support. It isn’t just an information product where, “Oh, okay. I’m going to watch this video or study this book.” No, we have you do the work on yourself.
So if you’re a practitioner out there or if you’re a health coach or a personal trainer, a nutritionist, we have acupuncturists and a lot of chiropractors and those kind of people, if you’re any kind of professional or want to be one, you could take the course and learn how to be an FDN practitioner and you’ll get walked through everything. You’ll work on it yourself, you’ll work on mock-up clients and then you’ll get a couple of real clients. A lot of people just have their mom do it or something or a spouse. But it’s okay. We’re going to walk you through real test results and set you up so that you can run the labs. Remember, we’re not going to teach you to diagnose or treat. We only look for healing opportunities and use a lifestyle program.
So I teach this lifestyle-based D-R-E-S-S for Health Success Program guided by the lab work and I’ve been doing that for over six years for thousands of people. You could go to FunctionalDiagnosticNutrition.com. That’s the easiest way to get there. And actually, there’s a portal there where if you want to become a health practitioner, follow that portal. If you really just wanted to hire an FDN practitioner, there’s a portal there for that too.
And so just go to FunctionalDiagnosticNutrition.com and tell them Wendy sent you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, I’m excited. I have been eyeballing a couple of diagnostic courses where I can learn how to do diagnosis myself or using testing and what-not with my clients. So I’m going to be in the next few months taking your FDN Certification Course. That’s the one that I’m choosing to take.
So I definitely recommend any of you health coaches listening, definitely consider adding it to your practice. I think it’s incredibly valuable as opposed to just teaching people about diet. Definitely, you want to take things to the next level. So Reed, thank you so much for being on the show.
Reed Davis: Thank you, Wendy. Pleasure to be here. Any time! I’m looking forward to the next one whenever it is.
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Reed Davis: We can do lots of subjects, you know. Whatever is bothering your listeners, let’s talk about it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, let’s do it! For sure.
Reed Davis: Okay!
Wendy Myers: Okay, and stay tuned, stay tuned. So guys, if you want to listen and learn all about detoxification and the Modern Paleo Diet, definitely go check out my website myersdetox.com. You guys, thank you so much for tuning in and listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
