Introduction
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka, Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show on metabolic chaos.
We have something a bit different going on for the next couple of weeks. I’m going to preface it really quick, tell you what’s up, and then you can decide how you want to engage with it. We are doing some things at FDN that are leading to an amazing amount of new people checking us out, listening to the podcast, watching videos, downloading stuff on the website. It’s been amazing and it’s really cool to see how many individuals it’s bringing in.
With that said, one thing I always need to be conscious of is when we’re 250 something episodes into a podcast, it can definitely seem a little confusing if someone is just hearing about us for the first time. So, what I wanted to do is something that I probably should have already done before anyway. Maybe we should have started episode one like this. Because once I do it once, I can always refer people back to it.
So, I’m doing an intro to FDN series where we’re going to be covering some of the main terms. These are going to be shorter and sweeter podcasts. And again, it will last for a couple of weeks.
Metabolic Chaos: Our Only Diagnosis
Now, if you’re already an FDN practitioner that listens regularly and you listen for the stories and the content, I don’t want you to think that there’s not something for you here. I can make the argument that it’s always good to re-listen to things, get a different perspective so that it’s more solidified in your mind, but maybe you won’t buy that one.
So, this is the one I would give you. These are going to be general enough podcasts that they could be sent to your clients. It could be used as a marketing resource on your website where people that are interested in your services can now have a better understanding of what you do. That’s how this is going to go.
Today’s topic, I want to jump right into it. We’re going to be talking about metabolic chaos. I think everything else that we’re going to discuss will make a lot more sense if we define and discuss metabolic chaos. Metabolic chaos is a term that you will hear a lot when you are exposed to FDN, whether you’re on our email lists or listening to a podcast or whatever it might be.
Metabolic chaos is our only diagnosis here. And I say that with some bunny ears around it – some quotes – because it’s not a real diagnosis if you haven’t realized, especially if you have any Western medicine background or family members or friends.
Metabolic Chaos: Treating Everything Nonspecifically
Metabolic chaos is not an official diagnosis, it’s a play on words. We’re not literally giving it out as a diagnosis. But we make a joke that it is the only thing that we really address; that’s how FDN works. Metabolic chaos is the only thing that we address.
We don’t care about treating any disease or symptom specifically, understand that. We don’t care about any specific disease or symptom or how to treat that because we don’t treat anything specifically. We’re not doctors; we’re not nurse practitioners. We can’t actually diagnose and treat anyway.
Sometimes people come to us, and they have those credentials. It’s not required to go through the course by any means. And certainly, the majority of people who have gone through our program don’t have those credentials. My point is that’s what a doctor does. That’s what they’re for.
They’re supposed to run some labs or ask a series of questions that will then lead to certain criteria being met or not being met, which could lead to a diagnosis. You get that diagnosis and there are approved forms of treatment for said diagnosis.
Generally speaking, you would start with the ones that have the least amount of risk to them and then move up over time if these symptoms did not resolve. For example, my mom had Graves’ disease, which is an autoimmune condition. And unfortunately, we didn’t know all the stuff we know now, back then. She’s doing fantastic by the way, but there’s some things that were lost in the process. Let me explain.
Metabolic Chaos: The Western Medicine Process
She had Graves’ disease, which is an autoimmune condition of the thyroid. Many of you listening have probably heard of hypothyroidism or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Graves’ disease is, I don’t want to say the opposite, but it kind of is for the sake of a simple conversation.
Hashimoto’s is the autoimmune thyroid disease that’s associated with underactive thyroid. Graves’ disease is like the opposite. So, if a Hashimoto’s person feels like everything’s going slow, extreme weight gain, and all that kind of stuff, Graves’ disease is everything is sped up. My mom would be sitting on the couch trying to rest, and her heart rate was 120 something beats per minute, which is like double what the average is. It’s kind of scary; it’s crazy what can happen to people with these conditions.
First, she goes in, doesn’t really get a diagnosis for the first seven years. Finally, she gets a diagnosis of Graves’ disease and then they put her on a medication. Well, that lasts for a couple of years. Her symptoms aren’t getting better, they’re not getting to where we need to go.
So, now we come up with the next option, at least Western Medicine comes up with the next option. Okay, the medication didn’t work. That was the thing that we could give you that had the least amount of risk to it for your situation. But it didn’t get you to where you wanted to go. So, here’s the next option.
We can do a thyroidectomy, a removal of the thyroid from the body. And of course, that doesn’t always work how it is intended. But nonetheless that is what happened to my mom, she had her thyroid completely removed from her body. That’s what Western medicine will do.
Metabolic Chaos: FDN is a Different System
You have to be in or out of a range, which she was. She was out of these certain blood markers that led to a diagnosis of Graves’ disease. Then we start with the treatment forms that are the least harmful. So, we started with some synthetic thyroid hormone. No one really has ever died from that. Well, maybe there was one or two; I don’t know. I shouldn’t misspeak, I guess.
But that’s a, generally speaking, relatively safe thing. You know, we know the dosages. A lot of people take it. It’s very common to be prescribed. So, we kind of know what we’re doing with that one. Alright, well that didn’t work.
What’s the next thing we can do? Well, we can just take out the thyroid as if the thyroid’s the problem, which obviously it’s not. But that’s what happens. And of course, that’s a very major event in someone’s life. Not everyone wants to do that. That’s why we don’t start with a thyroidectomy.
So, you see how that goes. It is a diagnosis, which is based off certain criteria being met or not being met. Then you start with the safest options. And then you move on to things that are a bit riskier, assuming the patient wants to do it based off the amount of pain or suffering that they’re in.
Well, we don’t do anything like that at FDN. Even though we use labs, we don’t do anything like that. We don’t care about those specific diagnoses or forms of treatment. Why? Because we know that there’s really only one underlying cause in chronic symptoms, and that’s metabolic chaos. So, how can metabolic chaos be defined?
Metabolic Chaos: What Does it Look Like?
Well, there is a technical FDN definition. But I think depending on the FDN that you talk to, you’d get a few different ways of saying this. I’m not the founder of FDN, that’s Reed Davis, but here’s how I would describe metabolic chaos. Metabolic chaos is what happens when too much is going wrong in the body, and you can no longer tell what thing actually came first. And it’s not even relevant what came first.
Now again, I’m not saying this is a perfect definition, but this is how I’ve always been able to understand it and digest it. Metabolic chaos is what happens when a bunch of things are going wrong, and we don’t really even know what came first, and it quite frankly doesn’t matter.
What would this look like then in reality? Well, what this could mean is, let’s say someone was really healthy, ate really well, but ate wheat and they had a gluten sensitivity or an allergy that they didn’t know about. Let’s call it a sensitivity cause it’s more likely they didn’t want to know about that.
Now over time, that sensitivity is causing damage to the gut. At this point, the gut microbiome is all screwed up and the intestinal permeability is increasing. So, now a bunch of stuff’s getting into the body. This person ends up developing other food sensitivities. And they have a host of pathogenic bacteria and parasitic stuff in their gut, which is now causing fatigue, anxiety, and they’re reacting to other foods. Over time, they’re under so much stress that, based on their genetics, the weak links in their genes start to get really hit.
Metabolic Chaos: Root Cause Isn’t Needed
That might look like a thyroid condition in someone like my mom. However, that might look like depression in someone like me. So, now we’re getting hit because of the weak links.
But by the time someone like my mom goes into the doctor and gets that thyroid diagnosis, is the thyroid really the issue? Is the thyroid really the issue based on what we just said? Well, no, of course it’s not. All this other stuff was happening first.
But in the cases of chronic illness, here’s the issue, the thyroid is a problem now, it’s just not the problem. Because now we do have hormonal issues in the pituitary, the hypothalamus, the thyroid, that are leading to this diagnosis that she’s getting. She does have Graves’ disease, which is a stressor to the body. I do have depression, which is a stressor to my body.
So, that is contributing now to the issues that are happening. It’s contributing to my symptoms, to the way that I feel. Really, it’s almost this vicious cycle. You start out with something like, who knows, a gluten sensitivity. But now that leads to pathogenic bacteria. Now it leads to food sensitivity. It leads to a myriad of other symptoms and a diagnosis, which is actually causing stress to the body in and of itself. That’s metabolic chaos.
Metabolic chaos is when so much is going on that it doesn’t even really matter what came first because everything is contributing to the way that the person is feeling and the things that they are going through. Everything is contributing to it. You might get lucky every now and then in FDN and find the quote/unquote “root cause”, but it does not matter to actually get people well.
Metabolic Chaos: Looking at Typically Affected Systems
And this is a direct contradiction, it directly challenges what all these other people out there are saying. A lot of people, even in the functional medicine space, will talk about root cause protocols, or you need to find the root cause. I would love to know what they’re doing. How on earth can they say with 100% confidence that they have found the root cause of someone’s issues?
I must be an idiot cause I’ve been doing this for six years; I don’t know if I’ve ever found the root cause of someone’s issues by the time that they came to me. Well, I have found a lot of potential root causes. But I don’t know that I’ve ever found the root cause.
That’s metabolic chaos. We don’t need to treat anything specifically; we don’t need a diagnosis; we don’t even need a root cause. What we do need to do is look at all of the main systems in the human body that are typically affected when someone is chronically ill.
If you get someone who has had symptoms for years, I will guarantee this person has a microbiome that is disrupted. They have pathogenic stuff in their gut; they have food sensitivities that they’ve developed. Their hormones are out of whack, the liver, oxidative stress, protein breakdown, those things have been affected. And certainly, like I said, they have a leaky gut. We actually test for that specifically. All of those things, guaranteed, there’s going to be an issue there. Guaranteed, they’re not doing the lifestyle stuff right, which is a huge part of the FDN protocol.
Metabolic Chaos: Designed to be Healthy
With all that said, that’s how we address metabolic chaos. We don’t treat it, but we address it directly and indirectly by using the same set of labs on every single client that we work with. When we do that, that’s how we’re able to get these crazy results that we constantly get on this podcast and our practitioners get for their clients.
This isn’t a coincidence, it’s not magic, right? It’s like, how did you guys do this? There are autoimmune patients on here, cancer patients on here, mental health patients on here, gut sufferers, all this different stuff, and yet these people are better. How can that be happening with just one system?
It’s because we’re not treating anything specifically. We understand, and you could even say, believe and have faith in, to a degree, that the human body was designed to be healthy. And I say believe or have faith to a degree because you don’t really need to believe that. The example, I’m sorry that I use this all the time for regular listeners, cause I’m probably sounding like a broken record. But you need to understand how profound this is.
If I get a paper cut, I do not have to tell my body to heal; I don’t have to go to the doctors; I don’t have to do anything. I just have to leave that cut alone and stop picking the scab. Yes, I know it sounds simple. But the reason this is profound is, think about what’s happening. You do damage to your body, unpredictably. It’s not like you said, at this age at this date, I’m going to damage my body. Unpredictably, you damaged your body.
Metabolic Chaos: Providing the Space to Heal
Yet your body is so smart and so perfectly designed that it has something in it – an innate intelligence – if you want to call it that, whatever works for you, that it knows that if it gets damaged at any time, it understands what to do to heal that. So, it had no idea you were going to get damaged then, or that you’re ever going to get damaged per se, but it knew what to do when it happened. You didn’t need to do a dang thing. It healed the paper cut.
This is the exact same mechanism that we are taking advantage of in the world of FDN. This is the exact same mechanism that gets activated in a way that’s actually useful when you address metabolic chaos. When you utilize the tests that we’re talking about, and you figure out the main things that are going wrong in this person’s body, it allows you to, more or less, coach down all the bad stuff, all the metabolic chaos that’s going on. When we coach down the metabolic chaos, we allow the body to do what it needs to do.
It’s an extreme form of the paper cut. You don’t need to be in perfect health for a paper cut to heal, right? Although, I will say it’s worth noting that someone who is in perfect health will have their paper cut heal notably faster than someone who’s super sick. That’s worth mentioning.
But generally speaking, even the sickest of people, a paper cut’s going to heal on its own. It’s not going to be a permanent injury for them. But chronic disease can be when we don’t have the other tools in place. So, that’s what metabolic chaos is. It’s all of these things are going wrong.
Conclusion
And it doesn’t even matter what the root cause is anymore. The only way we’re going to get this person better is by addressing many things at once. Not treating anything specifically but addressing many things at once to boost their body up is enough that they can engage with that innate healing ability that we have all been given. That’s metabolic chaos. Sometimes less is more.
And like I said, I want to be short and sweet on these podcasts for this series. So, here’s what you can do. If you have any follow-up questions to this, or something didn’t make sense, or maybe you really liked something here and you resonated with it, just reach out to us on Instagram. It’s @fdntraining on Instagram. You could also reach out to us on our Facebook page. That’s @FunctionalDiagnosticNutrition.
But @fdntraining is a great place to find us. We have real humans that answer there. It’s not a chat bot. We do use some bot stuff on Facebook just cause it’s easier, but eventually a real human gets to it to be clear. But on Instagram, you can directly talk to someone today. So, go to fdntraining on Instagram for any questions.
I hope you guys enjoy this series. Well, I know I’m going to enjoy recording it. You can expect it for the next couple of weeks, and then we will be back to our normally scheduled interviews. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a great day.
You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com, or on YouTube @fdntraining.
For more informational and functional health-oriented podcasts like this one, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/health-detective-podcast/.
To learn more about us, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/about-fdn-functional-testing/.
