145. Dr. Austin Lake: Biohacking Women’s Health - Birth Control, Hormones, Sleep & Nutrients

a 16 year old or even a 13 year old on birth control to control an issue that doesn't actually solve any problems but creates a lot more problems you start seeing the side effects of not having ovulation and that's a big problem long term and you start seeing issues like endometriosis and pcos you look at these young healthy childbearing women and you wonder why is it so difficult to get pregnant why is it so difficult to maintain a pregnancy because of insulin resistance right you got all these high carb refined carbohydrates being consumed in in conjunction with any current disrupting chemicals,

fragrances, lotions lathering on their skin and next thing you know you have this hormonal storm that happens you think about the fact that limiting that phase of the menstrual cycle could have that profound of an effect on a woman that she might not be thinking about i don't think very often their obi-gyn is explaining the consequences these women are getting testing done they'll come back in six months and they'll put on a home replacement therapy and things will change short term, but then they go right back to where they were because they're fixed any of the foundational problems that were existing. And they don't know that there are alternative options out there.
When we look at the pandemic of autoimmune disease, the majority of this affects women. 75 or 80% of all autoimmune diseases are having to females.
That's why things like this is so important for people to know, like you can improve your fertility

and you can do these things and it's very inexpensive

and most people can do it.

Like that's so empowering to know that's an option

for women that are having hormonal imbalance.

Where do they start?

This was like a more recent revelation that I had about. hey guys welcome back to the ultimate human podcast i'm your host gary brecca human biologist where we go down the road of everything anti-aging longevity biohacking and everything in between and i am super excited for today's uh guest on the podcast because we don't really get a lot of time to shed light on specifically women's health issues.
And our next guest is an expert, as you heard, on women's health issues, everything women, menopause, cycling, birth control, everything in between. And just so happens my wife is having the worst menstrual cramps of her life.
And she was like, I want to come in and ask him questions during your podcast. So she's waiting for you literally right outside the door.
Great. Good to know.
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Austin Lake.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Gary. I was very honored to get the invitation.
And honestly, the timing was great because we had the invitation, then we met at the Maha Gala and it was like just meant to be. Yeah, we had just set it up and then we met at the Maha Gala.
It was perfect timing. And I love that movement.
I mean, Bobby Kennedy's officially confirmed now. So at the time he didn't praise God.
He meant that. At the time he wasn't really in a capacity, official capacity.
But that, not not to get totally off topic because i know there's a lot of women like hey i want to talk about my menstrual cramps but um yeah we'll get there what was amazing was do the energy it was palpable surrounding i mean the whole inauguration but specifically at that ball and and also how many people are just freely giving their time you know folks like yourself and me and casey means and callie and food babe and paul saladino and you know so many of of the you know the folks in our our industry are really excited about the opportunity to affect public policy well yeah you kind of really make a change i think there's there's the the grassroots effect that has to be there so there needs to be a i think a bottom up and a top down to kind of solve the whole problem right and so we have to have the top down i think that's what rfk is going to give us the best chance for i mean there's not many options out there when you compare to our last hs secretary oh my gosh to him i think we got a pretty good chance to make some change yeah i i would i would really agree agree with that and it's just so awesome to see our industry you know participating in it because you know even in the biohacking world we obviously all don't agree on everything all the time but that's the one thing we absolutely are you know enormously united well there's core principles to it? Like most biohackers or just people that are in this more alternative health space understand like there are core principles to health that you can't skip over. And I think our government has different ideas on that and they think you can.
And I think that's why we're seeing such issues with our health. It's just, we've skipped over these core foundational principles of what it means to be a healthy human being.
And you can't do that. Like there's consequences to that.
So it doesn't need to be political. I think the whole thing, making this whole conversation political, it's just ridiculous because like people need to be healthy.
It was crazy though that not a single Democrat voted for Bobby Kennedy. Not one.
I was like, who wants to be on the side of, you know, the worst healthcare crisis in, in, in modern history that's going on in our country. And I like what Bobby Kennedy said because he said said there's no such thing as republican children and democratic children yeah these are these are children yeah there are there are children right and and the most prosperous thing we can do as a nation is care for that next generation right absolutely right because who's gonna who's gonna be running the show and 77 of our military age men and women can't enter the military because they're qualified from health perspective.

And you got, you know, highest rates of childhood cancer. You've got, you know,

I don't want to mess up the quote, but you know,

13% of our teens are prepubescent teens are, are pre-diabetic or even diabetic.

And metabolic syndrome is, is beginning earlier and earlier and earlier. I mean, I think people have this idea that this notion that metabolic syndrome is something you get in your 50s or your 60s or your 70s.
Historically, that was the case. But that's old data at this point.
When you see the complete decline, even in the last 20 years, like since 1990, especially last 30 years, but even the the last 20 years you see a shift where things are doubling and tripling in that short period of time you have to ask the question of like what's going on and that's what's so puzzling like you said about the democrat thing it's like how could you not and you also have to be scared about when you see this parabolic rise right so autism rates have gone and i'm not saying all autism is caused by vaccines or all autism is caused by food dies but right we ought to be having the conversation of hey how did it go from one in five thousand to one in 36 to one in 36 or i even heard one in 32 but um because this the stats after that are one in 15 one in 10 well i heard had Dr. Joel Warsh.
He was saying it's 1 in 22 in California. Yes.
Yeah, he said that on my podcast. And he's a pediatrician.
And he even said during the course of his practice, the number of autistic kids is parabolic. And again, that's not to say that there's one single cause, but you look at the state, the overall state of health in this country.
And we want to balance that with our freedom of choice. So I'm not for getting rid of McDonald's or getting rid of smoking or stopping alcohol from being sold.
It won't work anyway. Yeah.
It wouldn't work. We already had, we tried that once.
The wealthiest people were like the bootlegger. Yeah.
Right. We'll make it work.
So we don't want to make a black market, but, and you also don't want to interrupt freedom of choice, but you also have to have an honest conversation of, well, why are we subsidizing the most chemical laden foods in our food supply and taxing and making costs on affordable, you know, raw whole organic foods. Yeah.
And that's where I think the conversation on public policy needs to happen and then if you have corruption in public policy if you have private industry funding public policy research and i think this is where i that question of of okay if you incentivize people for for i don't even personally i don't even think it's about money i think it goes much deeper than that i think it's something to do more because like you could make money off of healthy people like incentivizing people to get healthier you can make a bunch of money off that right you could and i think that's what's going to eventually start happening but i think it really gets at a deeper issue of like just nefariousness i think there's like a like a heart and soul issue of why people would want to see people not flourish and prosper and also not to be able to replace a population because that's what we're seeing now is we can't we can't replace our populations what we're currently doing yeah oh no doubt that's extremely scary i mean i mean fertility rates in men and women sperm counts in men fertility rates in women i can't tell you how and i want to have this conversation even more in depth with you on the podcast but i can't tell you we my we, my wife and I started a clinic, you know, I'm not licensed to practice medicine, so I'm a human biologist, but we started a functional wellness clinic about 10 years ago. And I'm very interested to hear why you chose to go down the road of women's health, because that's a huge topic for us.
But we started this clinic and just in the seven years that we've been, eight years that we've been intentionally in that space um you know we have seen the impact of infertility i mean the vast majority of our clients that were coming in for hormone therapy and young uh young couples were having trouble either getting pregnant um whether it had to do with the sperm counts whether whether it had to do with the fertility of the female, or whether it had to do with miscarriages, you know, frequent miscarriages. And it became such a hot topic within our clinic system because, you know, you look at these otherwise young, healthy, childbearing women and young, healthy male, and you wonder why can't they naturally conceive why are these sure are these birth rates um i mean why is it so difficult to get pregnant why is it so difficult to maintain a pregnancy and so i think a lot of that conversations is going to start in earnest you know because of this movement yeah so well i think i think because if people don't again, if they associate it with, I can't get pregnant because of some external factor and they don't realize, Oh, I actually have some control over my fertility.
And there are things that I can do to change it. I don't have to be on, maybe I don't have to do IVF, right.
I don't have to just say no and look at adoption. Like I can actually get my body in a state where fertility is more likely.
Like, I think that's where that empowerment piece is so important to people, but it gets back to your belief to even understand that it's possible. You don't know it's possible.
Like I think that's just the card, the hands have been dealt and they don't know that there, there are alternative options out there. And that's why things like this is so important for people to know, like, Hey, you know, I was watching this podcast and they were talking about how you can, you can improve your fertility and you can do these things and it's very free or it's free or like very inexpensive.
And most people can do it. Like that's so empowering to know that that's an option.
What made you go the, you know, women's health route and functional medicine? Um, cause you haven't, I mean, you're very educated. You have a really interesting career.
You went to Tennessee for your functional medicine. Yeah.
That was, well, so that's, that was where I got my doctorate so I'm not a physician either I don't prescribe medications I don't even prescribe hormones right I think there's plenty of people out there that do that what I saw was that they were doing those things and it still wasn't working and they're on all these medications thyroid problems you know hormonal issues and chronic pain I was like I just started asking like how do you how do you sleep you know what do you what what supplements do you take what's your diet like and i started asking these questions back in 2017 and realized that those things were not being done and yet we're assuming that they have a deficiency of medication when the reality is they have all these other deficiencies that aren't being met and so i started seeing that happen and then i started seeing a lot of women come through my practice just like having all those issues way more than men and i think when you say your practice what kind of practice do you have so it so we have a so it used to be a brick and mortar practice in colorado we had um my he wasn't business partner then and now we were we took a break now we're business partners again um he's a he's an md functional medicine certified all that and so we created this practice um functional medicine based alternative health practice um just out of need like we saw a huge need in our local community in colorado northern colorado and um started to kind of just help women and men at that time but we had way more women coming in with health problems and i started to figure out you know i was just like these these women are not getting help with the implementation of this information like they're getting testing done they'll come back in six months and they'll get put on a hormone replacement therapy and things will change short term but then they go right back to where they were because they're fixed any of the foundational problems that were existing and so right i started to ask the question like well if they're not going to take like if if somebody else isn't like who else is going to do this if it's not for me right that was kind of question i asked is like i can't assume that somebody else is going to do this like i have to be the one to fill the void here so let's start filling the void um that combined with the fact that my mom had a ton of health problems she was the ultimate mom gave of herself all the time to a fault to where she

had nothing.

There's a problem right there.

Give.

Yeah.

To a fault.

And a brother had cancer when he was 14.

Parents had an extreme amount of stress that they were going through.

Mom became a really big worrier,

rightfully so,

you know,

senior,

your 14 year old son go through cancer and leukemia and all this terrible

things that he had to go through. And then the financial consequences of the care they had to purchase or i guess afford and all that it was really difficult to do that with insurance and stuff and so it put a ton of stress on my parents um and then it affected my mom got on uh she's adult onset stills disease it's a pretty rare autoimmune condition her ferritin is sky high all the time because she's chronically inflamed.
Her homocysteine is chronically high. Very, very, the highest I've ever seen actually.
Wow. So her blood pressure fell away through the roof.
Her blood pressure is okay, but she's very, and I hope she's okay with me sharing all this information. I hope so too because she should be.
27, 28 million people. Yeah, not a big yeah not a big deal yeah it was not a big deal um but she's she's like very um she's she's an excellent mom but she gives of herself so much right and so that that's why i started seeing with my clients is like okay this is how my mom was and this is what's causing her life and is this happening these other women like so what's what's your what's your uh sleep routine like what's your sleep hygiene like well you know I take care of everybody.
I feed them all, I clean up the house.

And then I have a little bit of time for myself.

And so I don't wanna go to bed right away

and have a decent bedtime.

I'll stay up till 11, 1130.

And then I get a second wind.

I can't fall asleep.

And then I'm up and I have a hard time sleeping

throughout the night.

Well, what's your morning like?

Well, I wake up tired.

I drink a bunch of caffeine.

I don't eat breakfast.

And I kind of skip all that stuff.

And then I go to the gym.

I work out really hard and can't lose weight.

I'm just like, okay. So I'm starting to see this pattern here Like I'm seeing why this is happening, but I had to figure out the why behind my client, like with my clients, like why it was happening.
Because if you just say, hey, you got to do these things. Yeah.
And they're like, okay, great. But transferring that over to my life logistically is not that easy.
And it's like, well, it can be, if you start kind of break it down in these little micro goals to where you can start to understand if you if you eat after six o'clock at night, your insulin becomes a little less sensitive. You know, your cortisol is going to be affected.
So your sleep is going to be affected. And then you're going to be tired the next day.
And so if you don't break that cycle, you can't expect your hormones, which are being produced at night to be well supplied, right? You can expect expect that your that your immune system is going to be well supplied either because your natural t-cells killer t-cells are going to be greatly reduced from having poor sleep and so your your thyroid's gonna be more subjected to issues and so you start showing them kind of how this stuff happens and then they're like oh i need to go to bed in a consistent time so we are incredible circadian creatures and i think what you're touching on is when we look at the pandemic of autoimmune disease, the majority of this affects women. It's 75 or 80% of all autoimmune diseases are having to females.
And like five, eight times more than the males. Yeah.
I mean, why is it so much more of a female issue than a male issue? And I think it has to do with how selfless most women are

you know we we used to call in mortality statistics we used to call it caregiver syndrome

sometimes they would call it broken heart syndrome sure you know for spouses that have been married

a long period of time yeah but you know women are generally the first to put themselves right in the

back seat and say i'm going to care for my spouse i'm going to care for the kids and of course and

then their mother it falls ill and now they're caring for the whole family right and so everybody

I'm going to be for my spouse. I'm going to care for the kids.
And of course, then their mother falls ill and now they're caring for the whole family. And so everybody's needs go before them.
And they think that that's a very selfish thing to do and sort of selfish to take care of themselves. So I kind of look at, from like, as a Christian, like a biblical perspective on that conversation, I look at the husband and the wife, right? It's like from, from the get go, if you believe in Adam and Eve, which I do, like you look at the tendency that we all have from more of like a, like, you know, sinful nature or whatever.
It's men tend to be a little more passive. We have a leadership role, maybe that we're supposed to be fulfilling.
And we are like, no, I don't really, that's too much. Like, I don't really want to do that.
And so we kind of pass things off to our spouse. And I think women kind of have this like,

okay, well, I guess I'll pick up and I'll run with it and I'll run the show here. So you're taking on all your regular responsibilities, family, the house, work, financials, all this

stuff. And then it's like, we expect them to have good functioning hormones and our society is full

of passive men and very strong, like women who want to take charge right and i think we got to have a balance to that you know we have to have a balance to how we're going to manage that long term short term i think you know having a female who wants to build a career and wants to like gain education and like work out like that that can work like you can do that but you have to have this like this offloading these responsibilities in some capacity and i think our society financially or whatever even just uh from our perspective on on sex like i think we have this idea that it has to be a certain way i just think that's i think it's leading to our demise when it comes to our health problems it's encouraging people to to destroy their bodies hi guys g Gary here. I wanna take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my Ultimate Human VIP Community.
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So when you have a patient come into your clinic, which I assume is the majority of females. Yeah, and now it's just virtual.
So it was brick and mortar. Now we just do 100% virtual.
That's great. And I think that's the way to go.
And I think, you know, eventually with AI and big data and early detection and telemedicine laws, it's actually going to make this more accessible, not less accessible. Right.
I think we also have to modernize the way that we're practicing medicine. It's okay for someone that's been seen by a physician, maybe examined, that's now having a virtual visit with another physician.
It's more glorified coaching or consulting. Right.
And I think people need need that um more than they even realize so so let's let's start with women i want to start at a young age and i want to kind of work our way through post-menopausal because there are lots of questions all along the the path and you know i have uh two daughters i have a daughter and a stepdaughter um my daughter's 26 my stepdaughter is 16 so she's in the thick of it now meaning you know the choice is about centering around birth control and um you know the prepubescent acne that's now kind of gone away and and you know all the hormonal changes that are going on in their life which is a lot of fun yeah i'm sure i can't wait to experience that she's gonna watch this podcast yeah so i won't say her name yeah kimball hoy working or brecca um nothing to do with that um no she's amazing but but uh you know i went through with my daughter too with the the you know a lot of parents are you know watching this and that conversation about birth control is coming up sure And maybe because they have hemorrhagic periods, but maybe also just for birth control. And I saw a podcast that you were on, which one it was, but you were talking about birth control and the history of birth control.
And it, it was like watching Bobby Kennedy talk about some of these public policy issues. It absolutely blew my mind.
And I thought that I was pretty well versed in that area. I mean certainly don't understand you know a lot of stuff so yeah i mean i certainly understand what they do hormonally right that's hbg and those other things but i didn't know about the history of birth control so can we talk about that a little bit and then i want to start talking about you know young women and the duration of birth control and what kind of effects that has yeah i so from my understanding of the history um margaret sanger was one of the pioneers in the early 1920s of the eugenics movement right they were for this whole kind of pure society so they wanted to kind of control population and ensure that i mean it was very racist it was very discrimination uh discriminatory and um very much in line with nazism and all that stuff so not not a good place to start.
Like white Aryan? Yeah, just a pure society. Pure society.
Like white society, I guess. And so a lot of this birth control was directed through Planned Parenthood in these areas that were not white.
They were more lower income and maybe different ethnicities. And I was a tongue twister but they were just they were kind of targeting these certain areas of of the population they didn't want right and so that was kind of the beginning point of that and I think since then Planned Parenthood has obviously separated themselves with Margaret but the thing that concerned me was looking into when birth control became a big deal was mostly in the seventies.
Like it became a little bit more popular and there was a different doctor involved with that that kind of formulated that. And, um, looking at the connection there with the feminist movement was also when that was happening.
So it was empowerment of women, which again, we want women to vote. We don't want to have free speech.
Like all those things are good. Like there's no question about that.
Right. But it was more about, Hey, if you want to get out and work, like and work like you don't want to be having babies right so like let's just stop your ovulation cycle and like let's just you don't need to worry about that right and so you start having more women doing that and i think it's just that has only increased since the 70s and to where now a 16 year old is being put on birth control or even a 13 year old's on birth control to control an issue that doesn't actually solve any problems but creates a lot more problems you know you start seeing the the side effects of not having ovulation and not having a a proper cleansing of your of your uterus like that that's a big problem long term and you start seeing issues like endometriosis and you know maybe pcos depending on how far it goes and it there's so much PCOS out there.
It's crazy. It's polycystic ovarian syndrome.
Because of insulin resistance, right? You got all these high-carb, refined carbohydrates being consumed in conjunction with endocrine-disrupting chemicals, fragrances, lotions. Especially young girls, labbing on their system and on their skin.
And next thing you know, you have this hormonal storm that happens. And you're emitting a third of the menstrual cycle because you're essentially blocking the ovulation.
So they're going through the follicular and the luteal phases, but not ovulation. Yeah.
Which is really when women are probably at their strongest and most resilient and high energy. So you kind of take a woman who's like going through a full gamut of, of emotions and energy cycles and just how they feel.
And then you take out the best period of that cycle. And it's like, you're dropping their way they feel like drastically.
Like they're, I mean, that's why I think depression, anxiety is so high in women that take birth control. I mean, it's, I think it's 30% or more maybe are having pretty severe anxiety and depression when they're on birth control.
Like that's, and again, it's a third, you know, you're missing a third of that. And I mean, when we say that it affects your emotions or affects your mood, it also affects your desires.
Meaning like, what are you attracted to? What are you not attracted to? Um, you know, I've, I've looked at data that, that showed that, you know, women on birth control, um, have a completely different attraction to their spouse or significant other than when they're not on birth control. I've seen that.
I was astounded by that. I mean, you know, I'd hate to be like the dude that's wife gets off birth control and it's like, Hey, I also want a divorce.
Yeah. Right.
Just so you know, yeah, we're done. Just so you know, I'm not really attracted to you anymore.
But you think about the fact that, you know, limiting that phase of the menstrual cycle could have that profound of an effect on a woman that she might not be thinking about. Because we think that it's so simple.
Well, if ovulation is the cycle duration where I'm most at risk for getting pregnant, then I'll just stop that. Now things are simple again, no big deal.
But you think back to this circadian biology and, you know, when you start really interrupting the circadian biology, I mean, I had a client that I was sitting with, with a doctor, our clinic director is a board certified OBGYN. And she was mid, late 40s, like peri premenopausal area.
And she'd been to a bunch of hormone doctors and they told her well all your hormones are in range but when you actually look at the range that they're in they were in different ranges you know some are ovulating some are in the luteal you gotta look at day 21 typically when you're optimizing that yeah so you know so you're not a fan of birth control because i want to get i want to actually come back to this this this client i want to work my way up through through the ages of of women like what can they do or how how can they go about making this decision because parents are concerned that they're you know young daughters are going to be sexually active and um and obviously they're considering birth control, but not understanding the consequences.

And I don't think very often their OBGYN is explaining the consequences.

Yeah.

Thoroughly enough.

I think,

yeah.

So if you had,

if you had a teenager and I'm, I'm trying to like picture my own daughters here.

It's like how I would talk to them.

Five and three.

Okay.

And then I have a seven year old son and then a four month old son.

Okay.

Wow.

You got four.

Yeah.

Wow. You're active.
He has six. Yeah yeah you got six dude holy cow yeah i got three i picked up one along the way and um hey any one and one and more is great yeah yeah i mean and and i and i love it i make fun of it but i used to always tease my wife and she used to hate it um maybe that's why she's my ex-wife now but um but uh when we had our third kid yeah and she would leave town and leave me with the kids i'm like look before you leave just pick your favorite two and i promise you they'll be here when you get back right three is just too much for my your planes and i have adhd and i didn't know what it was back then so yeah you know but i can keep an eye on two but the third one's gonna wander i don't know where it's gonna go yeah so and she's like i hate it when you say that it's like my babies just trying to make her feel guilty for leaving no that's true yeah i think um so if it were my kids if it were my daughters uh i think the the whole sex conversations uh that's its own conversation by itself right like kids are going to go off and do things that are maybe not what you plan for them to do.
Right. But I think if you if somebody if somebody's saying you need to be on birth control, the first question I would ask is like, OK, well, what are they like? What symptoms are they having? What kind of problems? Like, is this something that's you're trying to control, like with with menstrual cramping before cycle begins? Like, is it debilitating in that way? OK, if it is, like, what are you doing leading up to the beginning of our menstrual cycle? Because once you enter that luteal phase, your need for, you know, B vitamins increases, magnesium increases, omega-3 increases as a foundation.
And then you also understand that you're going to be kind of on the tail end of this bell curve. And if you start here at the follicular phase and you kind of get ovulation, you kind of hit the luteal phase.
It really is like you're kind of coming off this high, right? And that high is going to require you to understand, like maybe I shouldn't be exercising quite as hard as I happen. And a lot of these young athletes that are being pushed and pushed and pushed, not considering their cycle.
And that's such a conversation I think should be so foundational. But does that like what coach is like okay girls like where you at in your cycles you know yeah right where you're at in your cycles instead it's like go go go go push push push and it's like hey they may not actually have it in the tank right now right and we can work on getting in the tank but having the understanding that when female bodies are not consistent like a male male's hormones are very consistent for a long time females are all over the place and that's why I think females are not consistent.
Like a male, males hormones are very consistent for a long time.

Females are all over the place.

And that's why I think female are so challenging is that we're not considering those fluctuations.

Right.

And I think that's,

that would be the first thing is just like,

are we pushing our daughter too hard?

Yeah.

Is she pushing herself too hard?

Is her culture pushing herself too hard?

Is she sleeping?

So can we read them conversation?

Is she,

is she taking basic supplements?

You know,

is she,

is she MTHFR? Does she have MTHFR? I love that you're talking about mth yeah nobody talks about nobody talks about that and women have it more often than men yeah and so it's like significantly more yeah it was 60 40 or yeah yeah yeah so like that those kind of conversations just having that awareness of like what are they actually up against on a consistent basis and then obviously you have to touch on food like if they're eating everything else that their school's feeding them or their friends are consuming and they're consuming all these processed foods like all the things that you always talk about that i love like it's like if that's a part of their daily regimen where their insulin is becoming less sensitive with their inflammation skyrocketing their omega-6s are off the chart and they're deficient and all these other things vitamin d omega-3s like you cannot expect that their hormonal building blocks are going to be there for their thriving of their of their body because like they're pushing a they're pushing a survival response through cortisol and that directly will tank progesterone and that will directly affect conversion yeah yeah yeah sleep and then convect uh it'll affect their conversion of estrogens from testosterone and that aromatase pathway and um that's where pcos becomes a lot more problematic for these younger women and so i think there's so many things that need to be done before birth control is even considered let alone the prevention of a child but like just in terms of prevention of the symptoms we have to figure out like what what are we trying to accomplish here? And I think that's the starting point.

And I think a lot of it is obviously preventing pregnancy,

but a lot of it is also like hemorrhagic,

you know, menstrual cycles.

I mean, because we see that a lot in our clinic

that they're coming to our OBGYN and saying,

you know, it's just, I mean,

that they're in school and they're exhausted

because they're losing, losing. Yeah, losing a lot of their anemic.
They're anemic basically for short term. And, and they're exhausted and, and already, especially in high school, you know, high school starts the earliest.
My understanding is we're going to actually start to change this, but I always thought it was odd that as my kids went from kindergarten to grade school to grammar school, you know and then eventually to to high school that the the start times got earlier yeah you know my sixth grader started at 9 a.m my ninth grader started at 7 a.m wow and that's a big difference because you know you got to be in class to start at 7 a.m which means you're after you get in school 6 30 6 45 whatever yeah which means you're probably getting them to 5 30 6 o'clock at the latest yeah and i i still remember you know driving my daughter um to school you know to high school and just you know pulling into the the parking lot and just watching the zombies walk in and you could tell like that kid has not been up for more than 10 minutes yeah right 10 minutes ago literally they were still asleep video games two hours ago hair messy you know sweats some of them starbucks coffees there's sort of yeah and and and i know there's a whole conversation around the fact that you know teenagers actually need more sleep these aren't lazy teens right they're growing physiological for sure yeah it's physiological and when you have all that biological activity in the body it's exhausting growing is exhausting you know um my son i noticed the same thing both of both of my sons um you know when they're playing sports and they were just coming home sometimes he would come home from from football practice and just literally eat go straight to bed yeah um and was still exhausted when he was right you can never recover but but back to the you know the women's hormones so i I know a lot of mothers are facing this.

And so you're saying before you're using,

you think about birth control,

either as prophylactic measure against pregnancy

or hemorrhagic periods,

is to look at the whole picture,

this whole idea of, let's call it lifestyle medicine.

Sure, yeah, absolutely.

And I think we start to think of those factors

a lot later in life

when we don't think about them for teens.

I never do that. let's call it lifestyle medicine sure yeah absolutely and and i think we start to think of those factors a lot later in life well we don't think about them for teens um i never did yeah i mean i knew nothing about this stuff and i my parents didn't know either you know and so i think i think for people like us who are in this world and this is constantly what we do and think about it it's like super obvious right like it's like oh just this is what you have to do and but there's somebody else that's not in this world.
They have their responsibilities. They have their job.
Um, they're doing what they're told and they're doing what they think is best. And so they think this birth control is the best option.
So we love our daughter. Let's do what's best for her.
Right. But I think if you, if you understand like, okay, maybe we can say like, that's not best.
Right. And just like, get that out of the way.
Then it just opens the door for people like, let's, let's evaluate our life. Let's figure out what we can do.
Again, that's not expensive. Like this is not expensive stuff.
Like it doesn't need to be a $10,000 a night resort in Mexico to make this happen. Like this is stuff that you can do starting now, but it requires intentionality and discipline and a belief that you can actually impact it and fix it.
Right. So I think that's where I, again, I always have to start there with my clients and just making sure that they understand what's possible.
And then from there, we just break down their life. We were talking about this other guy who's like a financial auditor and he'll have people come in on his podcast and he'll just like rip them a new one and be like, you're spending all this money.
Like they said they have no money. And then he looks at their finances and they're like, you have way more money than you think you have.
You're just like being foolish with it. You're not being intentional.
And I kind of do it with my clients. It like i just look at like hey you say you've done everything and nothing works but have you done this like have you tried getting your circadian rhythm balanced have you tried not eating these foods have you tried taking these supplements and being consistent with them have you actually followed a protocol like have you kind of done some detailed lab work like have you have you done this stuff right well i've tried a little bit of this a little bit of that and is this what your active life program is about? Yeah.
Talk a little bit about that. Is there, is there, so woman watching this podcast that feels off, right? Feels out of balance, which is very likely hormonal.
Yeah. It could be a host of other things.
And then I want to talk about, you know, autoimmune conditions for women as well. But where do they start? You know, what kind of panel do they pull? Where where do they start what are some of the biggest things that move the needle the most yeah for women that are having hormonal imbalance you know like this this woman that i was speaking of earlier when i looked at her labs i was like well look you know it looks to me like first of all you're completely out of phase sure so the level of your hormones doesn't matter as much as your ratios sure um absolutely and your ratios are way off even though they're in the normal range yeah um one's really high one's really low and you have estrogen dominance right and you have estrogen dominance and then they blow up like a balloon they think that they're fat but they're not they're just retaining water in that interstitial space and so estrogen is very good at doing that.
There are gene mutations like CompT that don't allow estrogen to be eliminated as like the E2 pathway as well. And so then they start retaining a bunch of water.
Yeah. And nothing is more frustrating to a woman than like doing everything right.
And exercising and they're not gaining or they're losing. They're not losing weight.
They may be gaining weight. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
So we start with whatever labs they've had done. We kind of analyze where they currently are.
Most panels are pretty basic, so we can kind of facilitate and recommend what they think they should get. And we'll usually start with looking at micronutrients, making sure that they have sufficient B vitamins, vitamin.
Amazing. Yeah, we have to start with that.
Omega-3, we do a fatty acid panel just to make sure that they have that box checked. So can you see the omega-6s off the chart when you do that? I've only had one person that was not like on the extreme side of the range.
Like they were actually like in the moderate area of the range with their omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio. Most people are like so off the charts with omega-6s.
It's unbelievable. when you attributed that to seed oils yeah seed oils our diet i mean a deficiency of omega-3s in our food that they're consuming so they're not getting any balance like yeah i think everybody needs to substitute with yeah omega-3 i heard you talking on a podcast and my wife carly she showed it to me and she's like i wondered if he's like seeing what you talk about he asked you like, what are the top five things you recommend everybody should do?

Yeah.

And like you recommended the things and I was like, she's like, that's exactly what

you recommend.

And it's like, I agree.

It's like, you gotta have vitamin D three with K2.

You gotta have magnesium.

You gotta make sure you have sufficient omega three fatty acids.

And you know, you can throw in a couple of different things, multivitamin B complex,

whatever.

But like, those are so crucial to just basic foundational health.

I agree.

For the human being. And they're, they're not being like, I talk about it all the time and i know you talk about all the time too but it's still people don't know about it yeah i'm just like how is this part of me thinks it's too simple like um you know people want something extra more extra complicated and and i don't even sell those things right so um that freaks people out yeah but uh uh and you know i get accused of trying to push things all the time i'm like guys i didn't i i would you can go to a thorn you can go to peer encapsulation yeah okay you can go to yeah there's there's a lot of options a lot of great options out there but these are the basics right you can't skip the basics and and i think too that you know my research or now my personal research sorry the research that i was um was reviewing when I was in that industry, there was clear pathways between nutrient deficiencies and the expression of disease.
And I believe that the root of a lot of these consequences of aging, just based in missing raw materials. I mean, if you don't have enough DHEA, for example example you're never going to construct certain hormones right if your cortisol is off the charts or you have adrenal fatigue um you're you're not going to make certain hormones especially at night when your body's actually creating that's necessary and we're such circadian creatures so let's talk about a basic panel and then then for listeners right now, especially my female audience, what lifestyle changes make the greatest impact on self-correcting hormonal imbalances? So we'll start with the first visit I do with my clients is we'll walk through their life, all the kind of things we're talking talking at the beginning of the podcast, just like what is holding you back from being consistent? Like what, like what true obstacles do you really have? Cause some people have legitimate obstacles in their way.
Um, we can't change everything, but we meet them where they are. And I provide them a meal plan that I've, it's an elimination style process.
We go through, I call it diagnostic. Cause it really is kind of helpful to diagnose like what I, you know, I always say like what healthy foods are not healthy for you and what i mean by that is that eggs for example that's a big spectrum of what quality is and also how your immune system responds to it eggs are a superfood like if you do all of them they're fantastic if you don't they trash your immune system and so if you do well you mean if you aren't allergic to the egg protein right if you're not or the egg proteins or just like what's being in what's in the egg corn and soy and all that stuff oh yeah yeah so like acid yeah like so there's that conversation of like hey we got to figure out if that's a problem for you but the only way to figure that out at least in my opinion is to get them to where they better.
So the first four to six weeks, like I want to see that their weight has changed. Because if they have this inflammatory weight, like that should start to fall off.
From an elimination diet. That plus kind of like whatever protocol we get them started on from a supplement perspective.
It usually involves the foundational principles that I talked about. Every once in a while there will be a couple variations here and there um we always meet where they are and say hey like if you own these supplements that are quality and they the dosages are seem to be sufficient like let's keep those and start with those you gotta you gotta take them but you gotta start with that if they don't i'll make some suggestions on different options and brands that i think are better fit for them um but it's just there is recommendations right so depending on where we need to go from there we get that foundation set we get their sleep circadian rhythm set we get their hydration how do you how do you set their sleep circadian rhythm what what what do you tell them are the do's and don'ts for sleep yeah it's all the typical you know limit blue light you know limit your uh intake of food a few hours before you go to bed um make sure you're not over over hydrating right before bed because you need to wake up to the bathroom make sure your electrolytes and minerals are all balanced um beforehand um make sure that you know you're not just zoning out watching tv before you're trying to go to sleep and then fall asleep ten minutes later and you wake up an hour later and you're all disrupted and i think the biggest thing that i try to tell people though is there's this i like to use this example of missing the bus to sleepy town which is very childish childish, but it works for people.
And it's just saying like, you know,

there's a bus that's going to take you right to sleep.

It's the first bus is great.

Like it's going to take you right to your destination.

You're going to get there feeling refreshed and all good to go the next day.

If you miss that bus, like, you know,

you're getting tired at 8.30, 9 o'clock.

You're like, oh, I'll just push through

and I'll catch the next bus at 10.30.

I'll go to bed then.

You may not go to sleep right away.

Like you might have a cortisol spike. You're going to have an issue with your melaton melatonin dropping the next thing you know you're having a rough road all night long and you wake up feeling tired and so understanding like and the later bus is even worse oh it's terrible sometimes catch a second wind that happens to my wife all the time yeah second wind phenomenon like you're like captain chatty at one in the morning right yeah you gotta cut it off here yeah but it but, right? And so, and again, for women to understand how cortisol will directly affect their progesterone and how it'll affect their sex hormones is critical because you're robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of situation with your hormones.
Like there's a certain number of hormones you can make from your cholesterol and it's going to be diverted depending on what your body needs. Cortisol is a surviving hormone.
Like if you're like, hey, i'm stressed out i'm watching something that's stimulating you know i'm staying up past my bedtime and now we're getting into stressful conversation and now some i'm hyped up like you're not going to fall asleep like that's not how your body's designed like it's making you more alert so those basic things just making sure people understand and i never assume with anybody like i always make sure like this is what we have to do they tell me all the time i've done everything i'm like i i i take your word for there but more times than not we're not actually doing it it gets back to this whole idea of honoring your body and understanding like what am i trying to do with this and i can we can get in that a little bit but you have to do all those foundational sleep hygiene principles first like those are those are absolute necessities now i totally agree in terms of supplements you can't supplement your way around poor sleep yeah but if you so if you do those things and then you start supplementing with like magnesium glycinate l-theanine or you know something in that ballpark that's usually enough for most women to start initiating a good sleep cycle um and then from there if they're having like true insomnia you know where they they can't fall asleep or they can't stay asleep that's where have, I have a couple different protocols I've used in the past where it's like, we'll do a short, short term of a low dose melatonin, like 0.5 milligrams. And if they're not on any SSRIs or anything like that, we will maybe recommend, um, like five HTP for a short period of time just to kind of help that process get going in condition or in conjunction with magnesium glycinate or, um, L3 and on what kind of issues yeah three and eight yeah um that's usually more for like a racing mind in my opinion yeah yeah the three and eight and the methylfolate just in my opinion from my experience with clients it seems to work really really well especially for women with mthfr which my wife has yeah and she'll take methylfolate before bed religiously every night just a five methylfolate on the brain down and then and magnesium three and eight we take something called magnesium breakthrough which is amazing it's just like uh uh combo right yes all seven forms of magnesium and and the other thing it does is it makes you very regular yeah for sure it's and i always tell you know clients that you know if you're not having a bowel movement at a relatively consistent period of time usually within 45 minutes of waking yeah that's something that we need to address well that's one of the primary ways we detox right yeah and so so many women they have thyroid issues and they have sluggish bowels you know they don't detox and they're like i go every once every couple days right like that's not normal you know you should be going multiple times a day right ideally so um you can go more sleep or do you want to talk about well i want to continue with the you know the women so they get this panel done you start with the basics you fix the sleep you you start them on basic supplementation which i would so far agree with every everything that you're saying and i think these are the simple building blocks.
These are the easy building blocks that get really overlooked and they want to go right to hormone therapy, which I'm a fan of. But yeah, we can talk about that too.
Yeah. And I think I want to get back to what you said.
You said something really interesting of this idea, like it can't be that simple. It must be something more difficult.
And sometimes it is really tricky because we're dealing with human beings and you don't always know everything that's going on but i think i think we want an excuse to to be able to kind of just you know do what we want right it's hard being consistent yeah like it's hard being disciplined like it's one of those things that um i think it's one of those like choose your heart you know right like what do you want and down the road but like hard work sucks too yeah it does really sucks yeah i mean they're both hard but like the short-term satisfaction short-term you know instantaneous gratification idea is like that's what instagram is all about like it's just hitting that all the time and so we're getting that programmed into our cells like constantly so putting our effort towards something that we won't see results on for like two to three weeks which is to me it's like i mean i've had people that had fibromyalgia that had like debilitating hormonal issues you know diabetes autoimmune conditions that were just debilitated and like three weeks they don't like their symptoms start going away and they're just like i didn't even know this was possible like they lose weight they start feeling energized like what am i supposed to do with this energy i'm just like god created our bodies to heal yeah you cannot miss that amen like that like your body is craving healing but you also need the raw materials right you gotta have the raw materials dhea elevated shbg you know vitamin d3 which is i think the most overlooked yeah supplement in uh of all yeah right and d3 with some k2 um i think that is that gets overlooked And so either in an oil that already has the fat, so it's soluble, or with food. Yeah, with food.
And you look at the levels of chronic deficiency in vitamin D3. You know, they say it's 50% of the population.
I think it's more like 85% of the population. Yeah, I think so too.
I would agree. Especially darkened.
Suboptimal deficiency for sure. Yeah, yeah, suboptimal.
That clinical deficiency is like, that's below 30. Yeah.
30 nanograms. Okay.
And that's crazy too. But like below 55 below.
Yeah. Like that's most people.
And there's some really interesting research around breast cancer risk and other things in women with functional ranges being between 60 and 80, having, you know, preventative. Protective.
And I knew from the mortality space that, you know, the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID was a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. Yeah.
No one wanted it to be that simple, but it was. There was a stat, I'm trying to remember what the percentage of it was.
It was like 70 or 90% of people that died from COVID were like deficient. Clinical deficiency of vitamin D3.
Very accurate. Yeah.
It's just wild. Yeah.
And also, and also like they're calling it a racist virus because you know blacks were having higher death rate mortality rate because like well yeah they if they're up in the north northwest and like you don't get much sun and you have more melanin in your skin like you're not going to absorb as much yeah what was all darker complexed like latinos and there's probably a metabolic issue there too potentially but i think the vitamin d component is uh yeah it's so so critical huge i mean it's a huge component and i think that's where there was this where it seemed like covid was a little selective yeah but it was i think it was selective to the the biomes that were most likely for it to flourish which are going to be people that are immunocompromised have you been hearing about the amount of smokers that didn't die from covid yeah because of the nicotine bound to the same receptor yeah um we nobody wants to talk about that i was hoping i'm not i'm not i'm not trying to bring it up on purpose but like i thought it was a good opportunity i'm like this close to going down the nicotine bandwagon and you know yeah just just well there's some components to it yeah i think i think and we can like non-tobacco nicotine obviously not vaping not smoking like a patch yeah but some some folks that i really hold in high regard um have sent me some really compelling research same here nicotine and cancer nicotine and uh viruses nicotine and cognitive function um testosterone too yeah testosterone and we have nicotine receptors and you're right in initial you know in in early covid because it bounded that's those same receptor sites a lot of smokers

were not getting right covid yeah because i think they'd be that yeah right they'd be the most um on the sample group there's even some sort of a groundswell now around nicotine and cancer yeah um you know before i get anywhere near that uh uh uh you know i'll be i would bring somebody qualified onto the podcast but um i i've seen the the positive benefits of the non-tobacco nicotines i think a lot of times it's also the delivery mechanism right that's hugely important you know it's well because even even if you're using like a pouch or something there's a bunch of aspartame in their bio you know bio-engineered food ingredients and stuff like that so it's like right a lot of gums have by the way people never talk about gum like gum's one of the worst things that we're chewing on all day long that have all these chemicals in it but right yeah yeah anyway that's just a fun conversation but yeah i'm the same as you i'm like i'm very interested in it than i would have been oh 100 but the same i'm getting the same way with cannabinoids because we have an endocannabinoid system we create cannabinoids in the body um people think cannabinoids are thc they're not yeah you know um and you know and cbd even even microdosing of of mushrooms you know they yeah they not the psychedelics but yeah you know reishi cordyceps you know these uh you know for cognition and yeah for cognition replacing caffeine with those I think there's a role for all of these things. It's just that they get so abused that as soon as you bring those up, people think of the abusive roles and not possibly.
It always gets back to this concept, too, of the things that are coming from our earth that are healing. It's an alkaloid from this Madagascar periwinkle plant it has this is this is a good like you just made that up no you get you get oh the madagascar periwinkle plant you can i grow those on my balcony i i practice saying that like 20 times madagascarian periwinkle you don't have periwinkle in your fridge not the madagascarian yeah not that form south polynesian no but there's this there's this alkaloid compound that's uh i think it's called vincristine it's what they use for chemotherapy

it's it's like 28 000 a gram you know 10 times what it is for gold and uh it's like so what it

does is there's this is something else that sounds weird but the shikimate pathway within plants is

like what allows this to be produced and there's other plants that have the same pathway that is

producing these alkaloids that are very helpful for the human body right when we consume them

Thank you. pathway within plants is like what allows this to be produced.
And there's other plants that have the same pathway that is producing these alkaloids that are very helpful for the human body, right? When we consume them, well, glyphosate blocks that pathway. And so there's all these other foods that we're consuming that are not getting, we're not getting this access to these alkaloids that would normally be there.
And so you're eating this food that's like cardboard that doesn't have any nutritional, real nutritional value and anti-cancer properties to it.

And that to me is just like,

they know it's worth that much. They know it's beneficial in that way

and they're harvesting it.

But yeah, I didn't hear about this

until like a few weeks ago.

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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Wow.
I was unaware of that too. I mean, I know glyphosate is terrible for us.
It's one of those forever chemicals. Interestingly, I accidentally got heavy metal poisoning really yeah i'm I'm actually in the metal detox now.
I'm doing it with my VIP community. I'm actually walking in through the whole protocol.
What a good opportunity. Yeah.
Yeah. It was amazing.
Not so great for you, but, you know. Well, not so great for me, but it's an amazing opportunity because a lot of people, well, you know, have metal toxicity.
Number one, they don't know it. Sure.
Number two, they have no idea what to do. So I've just been very transparent and very, you know, vulnerable and authentic about it and said, here's my blood work and the collation tests that I did.
But here's the protocol that I'm going to follow to get out of it. 45 days, they're down almost half, which normally would take eight months to a year.
Wow. And so I've been just documenting everything and I got it because I believed a, it wasn't even a friend of mine.
It was a doctor that I was referred to that had this machine to reach that he said was restructuring the water and, and, and scientifically the explanation made perfect sense to me. And he had, he had a PhD in this arena.
It's just that the piece of equipment that he was using was um was actually made to be a welder not not to restructure water long story short um uh you know i ended up getting lead which is really bad yeah um and also you know very high levels of of mercury and and also iron so i'm i'm keyling those out of body. I'm doing EBO2, you know, sauna.
Yeah, that's great. I'm using non-chemical binders like activated charcoal, zeolite, sauna.
Spirulina or anything like that? What's that? Spirulina? Spirulina. Chlera.
Chlera. Chlera.
Chlera. But my whole point in saying that is that, you know, a lot of folks folks just don't they don't know what to do when they encounter these um you know toxic or the or even to test for these things mold mycotoxins viruses um heavy metals big point yeah and a lot of those are flying under the radar of modern medicine because they also don't just pop up on your labs right right they don't they don't usually throw lab values into a tailspin so they just sort of yeah they're very very hidden um i had a client recently she we she had mold um so we tested her she was having terrible issues with thyroid estrogen was just all out of control so i was like do you have any like where do you actually live in florida and so i was like well we're the capital of the world right here we won the mold lottery in miami oh i'm sure i can't imagine and so i was like have you checked for mold and all that and we did it we had to do mold tests and sure enough um zero loan or i can't remember how to say it um it's a type of mold but it's it helped or it it affects estrogen activity activity right and so she was very estrogen dominant dominant and her also her thyroid was just completely out of whack and sure enough like she's starting to see a huge improvements by getting that but that was something i didn't even realize well the amount of metals in in thyroid issues is is mind-numbing because the thyroid has a special affinity for heavy metals and the amount of mold mycotoxin that flies under the radar too but but what i've noticed is when i test the you know what what some of these filters are pulling out of my blood.
Thankfully, I'm seeing the metals coming out. And my serum levels are dropping and my urine levels are dropping.
But, and I feel fine now. I didn't initially.
But this, you know, I saw the glyphosate and the aflatoxins. And I was like, wow, somebody like me is getting glyphosate.
Now I travel. know occasionally it's you know a 16 hour flight sure i eat you know i am eating you know restaurants even though i'm trying to be as intentional as possible not perfect then i've got to think man the population has got to have so so burdened by these hormone disrupting um chemicals oh yeah anyway let's get i'm going to get back to the female journey so now they they get a hormone panel we put them on basic talking uh supplements you fix you fix their sleep i want to move towards the um you know the women that are perimenopausal premenopausal because this is a really interesting time for them because some of them go through it asymptomatic right um and i know several I know several of those, but some of them have, you know, crippling symptomology and tell me where you fall on the hormone scale.
Are you pro hormones or you're not anti-hormones? I mean, yeah, I mean, considering hormones, uh, rule the world, I'm very pro hormones, but, uh, you're talking about like, uh, yeah. Uh, obviously bioidentical isical is what i preference um i've had a lot of clients that have come to me after they've been on bioidentical hormones for a while and they're like hey it was great the first few years doesn't seem to be working anymore right and that's where we start to intervene um i always tell my clients if you're on them currently you may not need to be at the same dosage that you were on to start

and so as you start fixing some of these issues we always recommend they go back to their whoever the doctor is and have them re-evaluate it and adjust it and change them down because we don't want to start creating more problems if you give them testosterone and she doesn't convert it well and she starts converting more androgens and she's not going to have uh she's gonna have more problems than she started off with long term and so i i think it has to be a very complimentary kind of approach with it and that's where again where we fit in we're like we're not prescribing them we're not telling them to get off them we're just saying like hey this is where you are with your lifestyle this is how we're going to help support you in that and help you implement these changes and then let's let your body tell you via testing like what you need to do next and they they love that because there's no shortage of hormone prescription out there like everyone wants to do that but what about what about a woman who um knows that she's estrogen dominant um is it as simple as taking something like dim um or do you in in your practice do you guys rebalance the hormone Do you actually put them on hormone therapy and fix progesterone levels and estrogen levels? Or do you try to take somebody that's estrogen dominant and deal with that in a different way? So again, it's going to depend on what's kind of driving it. If it is a deficiency or if it is something like their gut health because of how involved your gut is in detoxing estrogen and metabolizing it and so a lot of women have and i shouldn't say a lot but women that have high estrogen they have also high beta glucuronidase and so that that is a affects the enzyme that will help to detox estrogen out of your system and phase two detox and so if the body doesn't do that because they have a processed diet and all these deficiencies, then like that's, that's the first place I assume is like your microbiome is probably disrupted.
And that's a very, again, that's why they see a huge effect with the diet we put them on because it's very focused on their microbiome and getting beneficial bacteria and eliminating processed foods and high inflammatory foods. And also getting their macros corrected to where they're getting sufficient fat and protein, along with all these other things we've talked about, their body starts to rebuild their microbiome.
And then when it does that, beta-glucuronidase comes down to a normal level, and their detox ability goes up. And next thing they know, they've lost 15 pounds in four weeks.
None of it is usually, you're not losing muscle, like they're losing water weight

and some fat, you know, but mostly water, it's inflammatory. And so when they see that happening, then it gets, we get their estrogen to where it's more appropriate.
And at that point in time, like you were saying, we look at the ratios is the ratio between progesterone and estrogen. Is that, is that more in balance? And I think as women are transitioning from, you 55, their primary ability to produce progesterone is limited because they no longer produce it in their ovaries, they produce it in their adrenal glands.
So if your adrenal glands are taxed all the time, you're not gonna be able to produce as much progesterone as quickly as you need to when you need it. And that's why I think, again, women have to- That's a game changer for sleep for women too.
yeah for all of us but so the hard part though is like okay where are they from from here to getting to here and like sometimes it does require dim or you know chase tree berry or whatever it is to kind of help get those balances right but that's not the first place we start like that to me is so we have four phases the the third and fourth phase are really focused on metabolic and sex hormone health but i don't i always tell them like we can't get here until we get this this your your inflammation your detoxification under control yeah if we do that like it'll pave the way for rapid success in these other phases with your thyroid and your sex hormones yes that's where i think that's where i think people need's where we start. Yeah.
You know, you've talked about the dangers of certain supplements and additives. And so what are some things that people should look for in, in, in, in a supplement to maybe avoid something? Uh, I mean, especially, you know, women.
Yeah. Besides all the like additive and like, I have a whole, like I have a book on all this stuff, but like one of the, I have a whole list of like.

You have a book on it? Yeah. It's not officially out.
It'll probably out by the time this is out, but. Okay, great.
Probably going to just be an ebook. It's called Holy Health.
Okay. It's going to, it's like W-H or W-H-O-O or O-L-L-Y.
And it's like a play on just like being whole. Right.
But also it's kind of funny. So I talk about like a whole list of ingredients like carrageen and titanium dioxide and magnesium stearate, like all these like basic ones that shouldn't be in there.
But then you have to look at the quality of whatever supplement you're taking. So if you're taking something like, you know, a B6 supplement, it's like there's P5P, you know, pyridoxyl pi-5-phosphate.
And there's also pyridoxine, HCL or whatever it is. And so that's synthetic, not a natural form of that.
And that's going to be not a danger, but less easily absorbed for the body. Yeah, it's like folic acid and melpholate.
Yeah, perfect example. Huge fan of that.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
And so getting those things right is where I just, I try to educate them. I try to show them.
That's why I think for them coming to me, they're like, what do you think I should be taking? Like, even the supplement conversation, like I'm taking this one. Is this okay? Right.
Or is it like, well, not so much, you know, it's very synthetic. And it's like, this is an alternative option.
You can look at it and it's natural and it's going to be absorbed and this is how you can absorb it. And so this is when to take it.
This is how much to consider taking. So that's where we start with a lot of these people.
But I think if you, I don't even know where to start with that. Cause there's so many supplements that we could talk about depending on which supplement you want to know.
Um, but I think it just depends on the supplement. You're well, I'm excited for this ebook to come out because I, I, I, you know, I do the same thing.
I have a, uh, a guide online too. And I, there are certain contents that are in really inexpensive supplements that not just fillers but you know folic acid cyanocobalamin yeah which is um b12 does occur naturally in nature but it's also cyanide based right you know b12 your body's going to have to convert it anyway right um so not very efficient i'm just saying if you're if you're actually going to go out and intentionally purchase a supplement's a, it's a marginal increase in price to get one that doesn't have the binders, the fillers, the additives, um, and has already been methylated.
And it can be a game changer, especially for women, younger women, menstruating women and pregnant females, um, to take, you know, methylated nutrients versus the other one. And that kind of just, you know, sparks something in my mind, but a lot of take you know methylated nutrients versus the other one and that kind of just you know sparks something in my mind but a lot of you know we're talking about food like we always want to start with food right like i think supplements i'm a huge fan of supplements i use them all the time endorse them a lot but some people are like why can't i get it through food like well there's a lot of reasons for that but if you're eating even quality food well i may i switch them out my clients over to you know grass-fed grass-finished beef if we can and of course get them all that all those staples going yeah yeah but some people like i'm doing that i've been doing that and i'm still not seeing my b12 is still low i'm like right okay well how's your stomach acid what do you mean like well i i don't have any acid reflux or maybe i do have acid reflux i'm on a ppi a proton pump inhibitor yeah and b12's low my iron's low my vitamin d's low it's like well like your stomach acid is not acidic enough to actually absorb these things and break them down and the way you can figure that out is that intrinsic factor is what helps you know b12 for example actually get into your cell and so that's a i always forget to mention this but like that's one of the starting points with this whole conversation with our clients is like, how is your stomach acid? That is a starting point of health.
If you don't chew well and you don't break it down well and you're expecting your microbiome to be good, it's impossible. You can take a bunch of these supplements, but you could get it through eating grass-fed beef and some of these other nutrients, these other amino acids, and you would probably be better off than where you currently are.
Right. And then we can start to fill your needs with supplements and things like that.
So it has to start with that whole holistic perspective. And diet-wise, first of all, I'm happy you're mentioning grass-fed beef.
I mean, where do you fall in, like, the vegan vegetarianism versus meat-eater category? I'll just say I've converted a lot of vegans into, you know, regular eaters. Okay.
Omnivores. Regular eaters.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not – I haven't seen enough to support that that's that's a good idea you know and i've had a lot of clients that were really struggling very very clean in their life you know very low chemical uh toxins coming through their diet and things like that but they were uh they weren't getting enough of the foundations through through animal products so so what are the most common um i guess misconceptions for for women of all ages that they make about hormone therapy or about hormones in general? Do you think that women are put on hormones too early? Do you think that hormone therapy is not used often enough? Like what are some of the big misconceptions that you see coming through your practice that you're clearing up? So at least in my experience a lot of them have tried home and replacement therapy so i think i'm kind of speaking to that crowd um and i think i again i i have a hard time getting a blanket statement on that because i think it can be very helpful and effective for women uh depending on where they are in their journey.
I would just encourage women to, again, get back to this misbelief that they have no role in this whole conversation. Right.
I try to explain things in very analogies. So if you think about a king in a castle who has his people in front of him, peasants in front of him, he has his knights in protecting him and that.
Like if there's a threat, he's going to be the first one to leave. He won't return until everything's all safe and sound.
And that's kind of what your hormones do. Like they're very much responding to an environment, at least your sex hormones.
Like they're not going to be there when you're surviving. And so if your environment is constantly sending a signal to your hormones that they need to respond to this dangerous environment, you just can't expect your sex hormones be well supplied yeah i hear mark hyman talk about all the time if you have a sick fish the first thing they do is clean the tank yeah right yeah they filter the stuff out of the water like they clean up the environment right and the fish heels but um and it's i completely agree with you if you you have to like believe that first right like start with that like don't let that don't't let the misconception or maybe even deception of our society tell you it's not in your hands.
Because I think a lot of it can be in your hands. From there, you can make an informed decision about what hormone replacement therapy will look like.
How much? What kind? Am I doing testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen? Or am I just doing testosterone? Or am I just doing some progesterone? Because getting a multitude of different hormones coming into your system and not converting well, because you still are lacking B5 and B6 and you still have issues with methylation and you still have this issue with your gut, like it's not going to go well for you long-term, at least in what I've seen. So you have to kind of build, yeah, get the fish tank clean and then start to figure out what you need to do from there yeah yeah they rarely isolate the fish and then start injecting the fish or yeah putting chemicals or synthetics or you know pharmaceuticals into the fish they really clean up the environment yeah and again that's that's not like going to solve every single problem right but i think in some you have to start there right yeah and and i think um a lot of people get so discouraged and hopeless with their effort.
And I always tell people, it's like, if you can get that set up first, it's like a good financial investment. Like, you can make money while you're sleeping.
You can be building better health while you're sleeping if you get these things in alignment. Your body can move away from just being like, I think people focus on doing a lot of healthy things, but they don't focus on healing.
focus on healing yeah and there's a big difference like healing is very active and very intentional and very specific and it's figuring out what your problem is with a qualified practitioner to then identify like what your healing protocol looks like if you broke your wrist you wear a cast like you don't just take it off on the weekends like you keep it on you heal it for eight weeks and then you get back to rehabbing and like that's the process but with our hormones and with our health we don't we don't view it that way we kind of just like well i'm eating pretty healthy right i'm doing some things i wear my blue light blocking glasses and i try to keep my stress low and it's like okay those are all very good things but like what is what is missing in your specific system requires specific information and then you have to follow that that pathway i i love too that you're very open about being a uh you call it a biblical rooted health practitioner yeah um talk a little bit about what the role of faith at least for you sure right plays in this in in this scheme of grand scheme of things and you know i i i feel like bobby kennedy is the same way you know he talks about his his journey and how I might be bastardizing his story a little bit, but he stumbled upon a book on, it wasn't really a faith-based book, but it was a book that had him begin to consider, you know, faith and belief in something. I don't know the story.
It's a really interesting story. And he tells this story about he wasn't a believer um and god didn't believe in jesus dad really had didn't have faith in his life he was an addict and but he knew he would do anything that would help him overcome his addiction and i forget the name of the book i'd have to find it and if i do i'll put it into the show notes because it was such a compelling story.
Just cut it in real quick. Yeah, I'll cut it in.
Or I'll just drop it in the show notes for the podcast listeners. But essentially he stumbled upon this book and basically it wasn't a pro or anti-faith book in and of itself.
It wasn't like he found the Bible and he started to read it and was like, oh man, I'm gonna start following Jesus. What he found was this book that said, it was basically what do you have to lose? Because if you believe in a higher power, you have faith in, in higher power, and you have something to fear, and you believe that there is something that is observing you when no one else is looking, then you can begin to live a life that is, um, the same, whether or not you're in the presence of other people or not.
So in other words, you know, he was like, it really spoke to his heart because the addiction is something that you hid. You know, it's not like you would shoot up in a room with a bunch of other people, you know, you would, you know, you'd go blindly around the corner into the bathroom and something nobody's watching.
And, but this, this whole idea of a belief in a higher power said that there's never a time that you're not, you know, being watched. You might not be being judged, but you're being, being watched.
And it, it started this road to faith. And while he was considering it, he talks about this volleyball game that he was playing.
And while he's playing volleyball, somebody hit the ball and it bounced off of a pole. soon as it bounced off the pole he goes that's going to get hit by a truck and the ball you got to look this yeah you have to watch us and and it literally the ball bounced out into a street and got run over by an 18-wheeler and everybody on the volleyball court was like what and and he said it was right after he found this book and he was like he thought that this was a sign yeah sure and so he took a right turn that's what it took for him yeah so i think everybody has it you know a different story about yeah maybe you grew up and in faith is always you know rooted in your family it was easy for you you know for me i was saved by a promise keepers convention years ago but um so tell me about, you know, a little bit about what that means.
So the biblically rooted thing is probably the most important aspect of this whole thing from, from my practices perspective in my life. But I think there's two, there's two, again, two simple ways to think about it.
There's a conversation that we are ignorant to things we don't know. God says in Hosea chapter four, verse six, I think that my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
That's a problem. You know, we don't want to be destroyed by things we don't know.
The second thing is iniquities. Those are things that we do know, we do anyway, and like, don't really care.
It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to harm my body. And this was like a more recent revelation that I had about the verse.
I think it's first Corinthians 13.

Like,

you know,

your body's a temple,

the Holy spirit.

In that it says though,

like,

you know,

your bodies are not your own.

They were bought with a price.

Therefore honor God with your bodies.

And the thing that stuck out to me was like,

Oh,

this isn't mine.

Like if I brought somebody's car,

like I feel,

I always call it the temple.

Yeah.

But like,

if I brought somebody's car,

like I felt a full gas, like I'll maybe clean it out a little bit. If it's my car, I'm like, eh, I don't know.
It's fine. I'll just maybe not wash it this week or fill it up.
But I think having that perspective, like this is not mine. Like this is a vessel that God gave me to be a steward over.
Um, that, that belief is, is so impactful when it comes to this health stuff because you can have all the information that people have so much information these days about what they could potentially do with their health. Yet most people don't take any action on it.
And I think we were talking about this today on the way over here. It's just like in Ecclesiastes, you know, King Solomon had everything.
Richest person probably ever. Thousand chariots, thousand wives.
Yeah. Everything.
Yeah. A lot of wives.
Yeah. I mean, maybe that's, maybe that's where he went wrong's tough yeah that was his downfall yeah there's one right there but like you know he's talking about and he always says meaningless it's all vanity under the sun and all this stuff and i think from a believer's perspective even just like an average or person that doesn't a believer it's like well it's all meaningless what does it even matter but that's not the point of ecclesiastes like the point of ecclesiastes is that it's not like the actual real word is uh like a hebrew word is like hevel is like what meaningless means so we associate with like nothing hevel is like it's like you can't grasp it it's like seeing fog go across like you see it you don't understand it you can't like put your hand on it right so that's kind of what life is like life is hevel like it's not something that we can fully grasp and put our hands on but it's not it's not like pointless like there's so much value in our life but we can't go one side of making it all about might as well not do anything because what's what's the point and we also can't make it about making it an idol to where like this is all it's about and like my health is everything and my biomarkers everything and like my fitness is everything because like that's that's not healthy either so right i think for me as a christian it's like i have to kind of constantly be in this this mindset of like it's not this it's not meaningless but it's not everything at the same time and like this is for me it's like god has a plan for my life that is bigger than i even understand and he has an impact and i can tell i can tell you a bunch of stories about this but before i even blew up online i prayed that god opened the floodgates and bring people to me like two years ago.
And each time like sitting here with you right now, it's just like so, so surreal because like I never would imagine this would ever happen. But like when it happens, I'm like, oh, like I prayed for this to happen.
And as a child of God, he likes giving good gifts and he likes showing off a little bit, you know, and saying like, hey, like I am in control here. Like, don't forget, like I am in control.
And that this life is not meaningless. It's not pointless.
Like you are here for a reason. And I think as parents, as people who are trying to better their health, you have to figure out what is that reason for you? Like, what is that why to where all this effort that you're putting in all this toil, like King Solomon talks about Ecclesiastes, like the toil is our reward.
The toil is worth it. Hard work is good.

But understanding why you're

doing it is better.

I think if people can get that correlation dialed in

to where they know that if I do these things,

it's going to yield a result and that it's worth it,

people are going to

invest in their health and that they

won't have nearly the issues that they're

having now because they see that

what they do matters and that there is that there's there's some level of like purpose and all that and it's not about all the money we make and all that stuff like that's all going to fall away at some point it's like if you build a sandcastle like you start at 7 a.m in the morning you build this magnificent sandcastle and it's beautiful you're like really you you're like toiling with it you're laboring with it doing with your child or something like that and then next thing you know the tide comes in and washes it all away right like that's what our life is yeah but like all that that whole process building sandcastle wasn't for nothing it all had value that's amazing man well um first of all this this has been amazing i'm definitely going to have you back. I want to follow your journey.

Um, tell my audience where they can find you.

Yes.

So, uh, online at my Instagram, you guys can link that.

I usually have a link at the top of my page. Um, Dr.
Austin Lake, dr.austin.lake, um, dr.austin.lake.

That's right.

Okay.

Um, I also, I, I currently have a website that's transitioning and so it's going to be under holy dot health um transitioning to what a male or female no it's just transitioning so we're building we're building uh we're going to start training coaches okay to operate in this because we've had such a high demand for what we're doing like just like yourself and so we're bringing we're building a training program for coaches to help them to go out and to service these people that need help to help implement this stuff. And it's like, and it's not that it's like secretive information, but it's just people need help with implementation.
So it's going to be this new thing that we're doing. That's why it's transitioning to a different website, but I'll be talking more about that on my social media and stuff.
So you can find, you can also just Google my name and you'll find stuff on me. Okay, great.
Well, I wind down all my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. Yeah.
So there's no right or wrong answer to this question, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? Oh man. Russell Brand stole the answer.
I watched that episode. I asked Russell Brand, he sat right in that chat.
I know that dude is amazing. He is.
He is so smart. But yeah, he said Jesus Christ, which that's like such a perfect answer.
Like, how are you going to beat that? I think it's along those lines of imaging who Christ is. And, you know, it's loving the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul.
And then loving other people as yourself. Those are really hard things to do.
Like, those are the two greatest commandments that god has put on our life very simple but to be able to do that to have

the mental clarity to be able to have the energy to be able to be the hands and feet of of our creator like it's very difficult and so being an ultimate human for me is really getting my body in a position getting my mind in position to where i can be obedient to God's calling. Like that to me would be an ultimate human.
That's amazing. Well, guys, uh, what, what an amazing podcast.
Um, you know, Dr. Austin and I are going to move into the, uh, VIP ultimate human group.
Now, if you're interested in becoming a VIP ultimate human, it's $97 a month. You can sign up at my website.
Just go to theultimatehuman.com.

We do private podcasts. We do all kinds of challenges.
We do live group Q&As in there.

So go over to my website and check it out. And otherwise, as always, it's just science.