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Audio Version: https://chantelray.podbean.com/e/87/

Video Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnUtREFk09c&feature=youtu.be

Dr. Reed’s website: https://bonesandhormones.com/diet/

 

Chantel:           Hey guys. Welcome to this week’s episode. Today’s guest is Reed Davis. He’s the founder of the functional diagnostic nutrition. He serves as a health director and case manager at the wellness center in southern California and it’s been over ten years. We’re so excited to have you. Welcome, Reed.

Reed:               Well, thanks so much for helping me. I hope we can provide some good information that’s actionable to your viewers and audience.

Chantel:           Awesome. Well, sometimes people say, “What’s the biggest difference in functional diagnostic nutrition and seeing a ‘regular doctor?'” What do you tell them?

Reed:               It’s a great question. Of course, regular doctors are wonderful and they save a lot of lives and they’re great to have around when you need one. The difference, though, is that they generally diagnose and treat disease or manage disease. They generally do it with drugs and surgery and things like that. So they’re absolutely great at intervening when a person has a real fast downward spiral in health. You know, you need to go see a doctor.

At the same time, we all know that they don’t really look for underlying causes of conditions, and there’s not enough of them doing that anyway, and there’s not enough of them doing anti aging. They definitely don’t teach you what to do to maintain health. So generally, we find people going to doctors with a health complaint. Often they’ve had it for many years, and they just get something for the symptoms. They’re not happy with that. People today are actually willing to do a little work. They’re asking, “What can I do where I don’t have to see a doctor?” That’s where we come in with education and other things. I’ve spent 20 years sorting that out, what can people do.

Chantel:           And everyone knows I love a great acronym. You have a great one called DRESS for success health program. Can you just kind of explain, what is DRESS and what does it stand for?

Reed:               Absolutely. You know, you mentioned in my brief bio there that I spent ten years managing a clinic. I was the case manager. So every single person had to see me. What started all this was actually at the very beginning when people walking in our door of our clinic, it really frustrated me that they’d already seen five or six or more practitioners, and yet they still had their complaint. It just didn’t make any sense to me.

I might have been pretty naïve at the time, but I decided I would be the last person they needed to see. Fortunately, I had a lot of really good mentors and I was on this quest and I learned to run the lab work first. So before we do the DRESS protocol, we usually have fully assessed a person’s condition, like underlying conditions. Again, these are not things doctors are looking for. We’re looking for imbalances within the hormones, the immune system, digestion, detoxification, your basic functions. We see healing opportunities there. We see, “Hey, this could be improved.” Believe me, it doesn’t show up in blood work that your doctor is doing. That’s why when you go see a doctor, you go off and hear, “You look fine. You look normal.” But we know you’re not and you know you’re not.

So once we’ve assessed, which is the first step, then the DRESS protocol comes in. It’s called DRESS for Health Success. It’s trademarked because it was so successful, we were granted a trademark. All of my certified practitioners use it. So it stands for Diet, Rest, Exercise, Stress Reduction, and Supplementation. So it’s a holistic lifestyle program that doesn’t treat anything specifically, but it treats everything, every cell in the body, every tissue, every organ, every system. It treats the entire organism, you might say non specifically. It just helps fix everything. That way we’re not practicing medicine without a license. You know, we’re not diagnosing and treating a specific disease even if you have one. We just look for healing opportunities with the labs, and then we apply the health principles encompassed in that DRESS program. It took me a lot of years to figure out what really makes people better. Again, I didn’t want to just treat their symptoms or what’s called palliative care.

Chantel:           Great. Let’s jump right into the listener questions. The first one is from Alex in Virginia Beach. I’ve had the hardest time falling asleep lately. I wake up everyday at 4:30 am, so I should be exhausted, and I usually am. I’ve tried eliminating my afternoon coffee and I’m only drinking coffee in the morning now, and that hasn’t helped. I’ve also cut out alcohol and that hasn’t helped me either. Once I fall asleep, I sleep like a rock, but I feel exhausted when my 4:30 alarm goes off. What can you recommend to help me sleep that I already haven’t mentioned? Are there any supplements I could try?

Reed:               Well, there are some supplements, but before that … you know, we like Kava Kava, we like Melatonin sometimes, we like chamomile tea, we like some other things like that, Valerian. There are some herbal things that can relax you. So you basically want to be relaxed, but it could be that there’s some unknown or hidden stress factor that’s keeping the cortisol high. This is why we do lab work on our people who aren’t sleeping well. By the way, 4:30 is pretty early, but if you have slept five or six really good deep hours, you shouldn’t be unrefreshed.

So the whole idea behind sleep is that we do a couple things. We rest the body, but we also get into a deep enough sleep where we rest our brains and our brains actually get a chance to detoxify. If you’re in a deep enough sleep, it’s called non REM level 3 sleep, you’re not dreaming. You’re actually out cold basically. Your brain cells actually shrink and then cerebral spinal fluid can actually flow through the brain and clean the brain out. It’s important to get four or five hours of that every single night or you could wake up unrefreshed or with lots of other problems, and eventually even serious health problems in the brain.

So I’m not telling everyone they need 8 hours, but you do need to rest the body and you need to get into a deep enough sleep for long enough to cleanse the brain. Now, by the way, while that’s happening, the rest of your organs would also detoxify. We know the liver works better, the gallbladder, and things like that. Your hormones, like human growth hormone is really important. That rises while you’re asleep if you’re deep enough asleep. So to the gentleman who inquired, 4:30 is pretty early, but if you went to bed early enough and slept soundly enough, you should not be tired. So I would probably start checking the various systems like the hormones. Again, stress is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere, and there’s every different kind of stress, and it does affect your cortisol levels. Cortisol will suppress melatonin. Cortisol is your stress hormone. It stays high and tries to keep your blood sugar high, tries to keep other hormones elevated to handle the stress.

So you really need to go through some kind of night time ritual of being quiet, getting rid of all of the … maybe this person’s staying up on the computer until 11:00 and then he tries to sleep until 4:30. That’s not gonna work. You really need to get into sleep hygiene, and as a matter of fact, I will send everybody listening if they want a document that we have. It’s called the DRESS for Health Success guidebook. So DRESS. It will have some sleep hygiene tips in there and I’ll be happy to give that to all of your audience. You need to follow that. It could include winding down.

Now me as a business owner with 30 employees and close to 3,000 students in 50 different countries, you might think I have a little bit of stress. That would be true, but it’s the perspective, the point of view that you take. You know, I’ve always been very thankful and grateful and meditative at times. So what I’ll do is first of all turn all the lights out. I get off my computer shortly after dinner. I might do dinner and then still do a little work, but you know, you’ve got to get away from the computer screen and then go to bed. Hydrate your body. Take a little protein snack. A little protein will raise your glucagon levels. It will help stabilize your blood sugar through the night. So a little protein snack, some other sleep hygiene including even what I do is I listen to YouTube on my cell phone.

Now they say that shouldn’t be near you, but you’ve got to have balance in your life, you know? So I’ll listen to YouTube all the time. It knocks me right out. Either pick something really boring that puts you out or books like audio books are fantastic. You even can learn while you’re asleep if you’re listening to meditation. There’s endless meditation that will play to your subconscious while you’re asleep. I find that very helpful, and lots of other tips In that guidebook.

Chantel:           Great. This next question is from Laura in Massachusets. I have been eating with in a six hour window for the past three months or so and I’ve been following the 80/20 principle of eating 80% clean foods. I was bummed when I went to the doctor the other day and said my cholesterol was slightly high. My doctor recommended medication, but I’m not ready to take that step. It’s not dangerously high, just a little above average. How can I regulate this naturally without medication?

Reed:               Fantastic. So the first thing I heard is that you eat 80% clean and 20% what? Garbage? I mean, don’t do that. Get as close to 100% as you can of eating clean. It’s a discipline that will pay off down the road. So try not to cheat on a clean diet, and like the firs gentleman said, he avoids caffeine except in the morning and alcohol. That’s another really good thing to do. So eating clean means clean organs, the detoxification. Your organs will be clean.

I think the question was about cholesterol. I’m not a physician, but I’ve studied cholesterol, and the current levels on a blood test that your doctor would do are probably too strict. They really don’t like the lipoproteins, the so called bad cholesterol, LDL cholesterol. I think that their ranges are not accurate. What’s really important … in other words, you can get much higher LDL’s as long as your HDL’s are in proportion to it. So what you really want to do is ask for a copy of the blood work, don’t just take their word for it, and look at your HDL ratio to the total cholesterol. It should be below a 4 to 1 ratio, and actually closer to 2 to 1 would be really good.

So in other words, let’s pretend that my total cholesterol was 200, which isn’t bad. It might sound a tiny bit high, but 200. But if my HDL’s were 100, then I’d have a 2 to 1 ratio of total to HDL. Now, that’s amazing. That means you have a beautiful ratio between HDL and LDL or HDL and total cholesterol. So that’s really more important. It should never fall below 4 to 1. So if your total cholesterol is 200, and your HDL’s are only 50, that’s a 4 to 1 ratio you see. So you don’t want to drop below that. What you would do is do vigorous exercise and watch your diet of course. Eat the right amount of protein and fat and carbohydrates for your metabolic type and then you’d be in good shape.

So we’ve actually seen people with cholesterol of 250. Now that’s out of range, for sure, according to medicine. But if their HDL’s were high enough, like I said 100, you’d be at a 2.5 to 1 ratio. That’s a beautiful ratio. So it’s your HDL’s you want to have high, and that requires the right diet, really good liver function among other things, but that’s my answer to that question. I would not take the medication myself.

Chantel:           Okay. This next question was on Facebook and she didn’t tell us where she lived, but it says I wanted your take on celery juice. Does it work miracles like a lot of people claim? Her question is does drinking celery juice break my fast? From Jessica.

Reed:               Well, in a way it does. She must be from California doing the celery juice fast. No, I’m kidding about that, but we find people coming up with all kinds of ways to try to expedite cleansing, and celery juice isn’t much better than anything else I’ve seen out there as far as juice fasts. So there is such a thing as a juice fast. In other words, all you do is drink juice. I could see doing it once in awhile, but generally, we’re not designed for that. We’re designed to eat regular really high quality, high nutrient density foods, and occasionally fast.

So unless someone is really trying to lose weight, I wouldn’t do a lot of fasting. In which case, intermittent fasting is actually a pretty good idea. The intermittent fasting doesn’t have to be more than just don’t eat certain hours. If you only at between say noon. Let’s say you started the day with a nice breakfast lunch, brunch kind of thing at noon. Then as long as you ate your last meal before 8 PM, then you would be fasting from 8 PM all the way until noon the next day. I wouldn’t do that for long, but that would be a decent, what we call, an intermittent fast if you wanted to drop a few pounds.

Even I’ve been in the health business for 20 years. Before that I was an environmental law and saving the planet, the environment and such. But I’ve struggled myself occasionally with self care, with really taking good care of myself. You’re so busy teaching and taking good care of everyone else. So you just buckle down and I apply the DRESS principals to myself. I drop, I’m at the right weight, and my body’s working good. I’m sleeping well. I have lots of energy, all the pipes work, you know? So you need to keep checking yourself and your immune system would really be really good.

So celery juice isn’t gonna really have that big of an effect over a long period of time.

Chantel:           Okay. This next question is from Rhonda. Oh, I want to say something about … let me answer the celery juice for the fasting. So celery juice has about 40 calories in a glass of celery juice. What we have found with people, obviously if you take on any calories, then you’re “breaking the fast,” right? Because if you’re completely fasting, but what we have found with people if they’re doing fasting for weight loss, when they do something that’s 50 calories or less, they still see really great results. So whatever they do that’s 50 calories or below, they still see amazing results from that. So that’s just from different people and different people we’ve tested. Yes, obviously anything you drink breaks the fast, but if it’s less than 50 calories, we still see amazing results.

Reed:               Yeah, I would agree with you that any calories would break the fast, but you need to stay hydrated, and some calories from juice would be fine. I don’t know if there’s any magic in celery juice, but I wouldn’t do it forever. The other thing to be really concerned about is that you would slow your metabolism down. So any time you stop eating, your body is going to protect itself by slowing the metabolism down. Your thyroid would slow down a little, metabolism would slow down a little bit. The problem is so then you’d burn less calories as a baseline. Then as soon as you went back to your regular diet, you’d blow back up. That’s why people yo yo is because they’ve slowed their metabolism down when they return to their previous calorie level, they don’t have the metabolism to burn it. So they just pack on weight. It’s really not a good thing to do.

I think a person, if they’re gonna juice fast, basically just skip meals once in awhile. If you wanted to lose a few pounds, you have to exercise of course and keep your body cleansed, but just skip a meal here and there and you’ll drop weight, guaranteed, without slowing your metabolism down too much.

Chantel:           Okay, this last question’s from Rhonda in Vienna, Virginia. She says, how do I know which types of detox are healthy, and by the way, Rhonda I used to live in Vienna, Virginia. She said, how can I know which types of detox are healthy, and which types are a sales pitch?

Reed:               You know, they’re all kind of a sales pitch no matter what because they’re selling you something. They’re selling you your juice or their whatever. So if you go back to the basics, like we call the general principles of health building, you want to firmly support your body’s own detoxification systems first before you start getting fancy with it like the celery fast or something like that. There’s all these other drinks you can do that would stimulate the liver and there’s lots of liver gallbladder flushes and things that would “detoxify” you. There’s sauna baths that detoxifies the skin and you release things.

But if you look at the basic detoxifying organs, which probably starts with the liver. It’s considered the grandfather organ in Chinese medicine and it detoxifies a lot of stuff. Anything coming off of the digestive system for instance. The liver gets most of its blood supply from enterohepatic circulation of just what’s coming off the guts and it gets some other blood supply, but it’s a big detoxifying organ and it works in miraculous ways and it lets some good things through into your bloodstream, some nutrition and what have you, purified hormones and all these things.

So you gotta take care of your liver. There’s lots of information on that. Again, in our DRESS guide, we touch on the liver, supporting the liver, but you have other detoxifying organs. Believe it or not, the colon itself is a detoxifying organ, and it will sequester and excrete toxins out of your body. The skin is a detoxifying organ. Considered the largest organ in your body. The lymph system. By the way, the lymph system, it’s all throughout … you know you have your lymph nodes here and in your groin and under your arms and all these places that might swell up if you have an infection. You gotta keep your lymph system clean which requires exercise. There’s no circulatory system of its own. There’s no pump. The heart has a pump, the circulatory system has a pump. The lymph system has no pump. So you have to move your body to cleans your lymph.

The lungs, believe it or not, the lungs are a detoxifying organ. How so? Well, they take in oxygen but they excrete carbon dioxide, which is a toxin and a poison. It’s very pro-oxidative. So you want to get rid of your carbon dioxide. So you have the skin, you have the lungs, you have the kidneys, or the liver, and of course you have the kidneys and the colon as I said. You want to keep all of these things really clean. That’s your best detoxification program right there. Keep those things clean. Then if you happen to find that you’re exposed to some additional environmental toxins or if you got some bugs, some living organisms that are excreting toxins in your body, and of course our bodies produce their own toxins anyway through normal metabolic processes, so you can do a few extra things like stay really well hydrated and enhance function of some of these organs. That’s my best bet, but otherwise, it’s almost all a sales pitch to me.

Chantel:           Great. Well, thank you so much, Reed, for coming on. If you want to go and find out more information about Reed Davis, if you go to bonesandhormones.com and you can go on his site and get that free report that he was talking about. We will add that DRESS for health success into the show notes today, and if you have a question that you want answered, go to questions at chantelrayway.com. Thanks so much for joining us, Reed. We’ll see you guys next time. Bye bye.

 

 

 

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