Kara Stewart-Mullens: Neurobiologix proudly presents season two of Coffee with Dr. Stewart. This show will provide our listeners with up to date medical information from a leading neurotologist and neuro-immune specialist. With Dr. Stewart’s broad medical knowledge, we will discuss how he helps his patients with issues such as ADD, migraines, hormones, sleep, fatigue, methylation, autism, genetic mutations, and nutritional protocols. I am your host Kara Stewart-Mullens and I invite you to sit back, grab your favorite beverage or cup of coffee and let’s have Coffee with Dr. Stewart. Well good afternoon everybody and welcome to Coffee with Dr. Stewart. I am Kara Stewart-Mullens, your host and we are delighted to be here on this Sunday afternoon. Hello Dr. Stewart.
Dr. Stewart: Hello Kara.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: How are you?
Dr. Stewart: I’m doing fine, thank you.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: You look a little tired there. What’s going on?
Dr. Stewart: Oh just lots of kid stuff.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Lots of kids? You always say lots of kids, but it’s lots of medicine.
Dr. Stewart: Yeah, but kids.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. They wear you out?
Dr. Stewart: Sure.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well anyways, I’m going to cut to the chase as usual and I’m going to say that today is a very exciting show for me personally because this is in my backyard. We’re going to talk about supplementation. I’m going to call it Supplementation 101. You know I work for Neurobiologix. I get hundreds of questions from consumers and they’re very valid questions, but a lot of times, we can’t answer those kind of questions because we’re not medically trained. Sometimes you have to talk to your physician or your doctor, but I just want to get the basics for a lot of the nutrition that is out there. It is a billion-dollar industry. There are millions of products to choose from.
So how do you know what’s going to be worth your money because you work hard for it, but also what are you looking for when you are looking for supplementation? Dr. Stewart’s been the CSO for Neurobiologix. They approached him many years ago to start Neurobiologix and he makes the formulas so he is the expert on vitamins and nutrition, especially the delivery part. Alright, Dr. Stewart, are you ready?
Dr. Stewart: Mmm-hmm.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: So I’m just going to start with a basic question. What are the different types of vitamins and I’m talking about water-soluble versus fat-soluble?
Dr. Stewart: Sure. Basically, the body operates in two major areas. One is water solubility or be able to dissolve in water versus fat-soluble which means they are able to be dissolved in fat. Now…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And when you say dissolved in fat, like crossover the fat?
Dr. Stewart: Typically our membranes that protect our cells are actually fatty type of things. Omega-3 fatty acids and many of the different chemical structures that we would consider fats…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: It is a basic law of chemistry. We have what we call lipophilic and lipophobic and that means loving fat or not liking fat.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: So water-soluble is lipo…
Dr. Stewart: Phobic.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Gotcha. Phobia.
Dr. Stewart: Yep. Very technical terms, but basically, you know that some of our body is fat, some of it is water and so what we have to do is be able to use a specific nutritional element in the area that it is needed.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. So water-soluble includes B vitamins 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, and vitamin C. So those are some of the ones that are dissolved in water?
Dr. Stewart: Correct.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay and then we get into the fat-soluble which are A, D, E, and K which all dissolve in fat. They can be stored in the body, but there are some B vitamins, in your patients that you always talk about, that have that conversion issue from water-soluble to get to the fat-soluble areas.
Dr. Stewart: Well to get through the fat basically to where it needs to go. So don’t worry too much about it, but what they’re really talking about more is the toxicity of them. We have the ability to pee water-soluble vitamins back out.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So no matter what levels they reach in our blood, whether they’re too high, they are not going to become toxic because we’ll just eliminate them to a certain degree.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Whereas the fat-soluble vitamins theoretically because they have no ability for us to clean fat easily, can become toxic if they get to too high of levels.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay and that kind of comes down to the methylation part?
Dr. Stewart: Well a little bit to the methylation. Methylation is basically just a way that we chemically convert vitamins to be used in different places.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And we’re talking about inside, it’s an internal refinery.
Dr. Stewart: Correct. Their function is the active form of folic acid and it has to really do more about what’s absorbed from food and what’s absorbed from the GI tract versus the form that we use in the cell itself.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Well then that takes me to the next thing you said about the water-soluble vitamins that they can’t become toxic because you can flush them out.
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: I get this question all the time from consumers, will your body only take what it needs and then excrete the rest?
Dr. Stewart: Yeah that’s really not…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Not that simple?
Dr. Stewart: Not even close.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well you always talk about the expensive pee.
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And you take a bunch of vitamins and you got yellow pee in your toilet. So what is that about?
Dr. Stewart: Right. So really what we’re talking about is the delivery system which is absorbing it, putting it into the bloodstream, and then what’s being used in the cells. We have to transport it from the bloodstream to the cell.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So the biggest problem we have is that different transport mechanisms are needed to put it into the cell. Ultimately, you don’t care what’s in your blood. What you care about is what’s in the cell doing what it’s supposed to do.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: That the vitamins got there?
Dr. Stewart: So we typically measure blood because a lot of people want to prove that you’re not delivering enough. A lot of times when we look at folic acid or B12 and the levels are extremely high, that means yeah, it’s getting into the blood, but the body can’t deliver it into the cell and process and utilize it.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And that’s where a methylation issue comes into play?
Dr. Stewart: That’s where methylation comes in. So always remember many people believe that you must be just supplementing too much folic acid or you’re taking too much B12. Well in people that don’t take any of that stuff, we still find those high levels and we’ve done those studies and basically we find out that they’re just not able to utilize and convert that form of folic acid or B12.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Because they’re water-soluble?
Dr. Stewart: They aren’t able to convert it in their biochemical process.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay because we talk about methylation a lot and it has a lot to do with methyl folate and methyl B12.
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. So we try and go around it with a lot of our products and we put it in the methylated form so that the body doesn’t have to make that conversion.
Dr. Stewart: That’s correct because the weaknesses that we are finding genetically. The problem is for folic acid alone, there are seven biochemical steps that it has to go through in order to get to methyl folate or the active form. We now know that there are weaknesses in genetics at each of those different steps. So you can have a screwed up pathway at multiple places and a lot of my patients who are more severely methyl deficient, they only produce about 20 to 30 percent of the methylated forms of those vitamins.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And we’re talking about people that have the MTHFR mutation, the MTRR mutation, a lot of people are getting their genetic results out there.
Dr. Stewart: Dihydrofolate reductase, folic acid one, two receptors, and MTHFDs; I mean I can just go down the whole list.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Oh yeah. I know. That’s a whole another show too. So well my question because a lot of people go, “Oh my gosh, if I have high levels of B12 in my blood, that my doctor said, should I stop my multi-vitamin?”
Dr. Stewart: No.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: You should find one that has the correct form, the methyl form?
Dr. Stewart: Well the answer is if you see the high level of B12 in your blood, that means that no matter what you take from a standard form, you’re not going to deliver it. So a regular B12 which is cyanocobalamin, it’s not going to help you. So the reason you take a methylated form is because obviously the interruption is from converting the normal B12 or the basic B12 to the active form.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So we basically are just bypassing it.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well you know that news report came out on FOX about pregnancy, women who are pregnant need to omit folic acid supplementation in prenatal vitamins, they need to have the methyl folate version. Is that because there are so many people out there with a methylation issue?
Dr. Stewart: That’s correct. Basically, it’s not omitting. There’s a false concept out there that’s very prevalent that folic acid in high levels because you have found it high in your blood, it’s toxic, those vitamins are not toxic. They’re just not being delivered.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: So what happens to them?
Dr. Stewart: They get peed out eventually.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Eventually?
Dr. Stewart: What I tell people it’s kind of like having an IRA. If you’ve got $200,000 in your IRA, you are not rich because you can’t touch it without paying a penalty, right?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Do you understand?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: So you’re not rich because the money is in a place where you can’t get to it.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: It just kind of sits there?
Dr. Stewart: It just sits there and so the whole idea is that many people will make bad mistakes not understanding it chemically. So there are articles out there that say oh look high folic acid in the blood causes cancer because they notice that folic acid being high and cancer are correlated. Well the real way that works is that you can’t process the folic acid so the immune system doesn’t get the proper form…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Doesn’t get the proper form. Ah.
Dr. Stewart: And does not work therefore the cancer shows up.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: You hear of people all the time like I have people that come in and they go, “Oh I just got a B12 shot, but it just doesn’t work.” I’m like well first of all, it’s probably not in the right form if you have a mutation.
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And you have to have the co-factor which is methyl folate.
Dr. Stewart: Right. So be careful of correlations.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: I tell people, you know, I was driving to work today and two blue cars had wrecks.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So I really think, in my experience, that blue cars have more wrecks so we should outlaw blue cars.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Does that make sense?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: No, the answer is it doesn’t make any sense. So that’s a correlation in my experience.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So correlations just mean that we saw a commonality or a coincidence instead of understanding the exact proper process.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: So a lot of women that come into see you are either trying to get pregnant or are pregnant and end up with an MTHFR mutation. You probably advise them to stay away from folic acid because they need that methyl folate.
Dr. Stewart: First of all, folic acid is in every green vegetable. You’re not going to be able to stay away from folic acid.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: So that’s dumb.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Okay? Don’t even think that. Don’t worry about it. What it means is when you absorb it, it’s going to float around in your blood and you’re not going to be able to use it and you’re going to pee it out.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well then how do you protect that baby because you need that folic acid?
Dr. Stewart: Because we have to then bypass the weakness that you have and deliver methyl folate.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: A lot of prenatals have methyl folate in them now.
Dr. Stewart: That’s right because they finally figured it out after 15 years.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Yeah, that was a huge FOX report and we got a lot of calls on that.
Dr. Stewart: Well guess what? We’ve been talking about that for 15 years.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: I know. You have. Okay that gets me to my next point because you say this a lot on the shows, you say; “No one vitamin works alone.”
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: A lot of people go; “What exactly does he mean by that?” I try to explain that methyl folate and methyl B12, they’re like brother and sister, they go together. Explain what you mean by that with everything.
Dr. Stewart: Okay. So basically God makes recipes. You’re not going to have one magic thing. So I give people this example. What’s the most important ingredient in spaghetti sauce?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Oh tomatoes. No, noodles.
Dr. Stewart: Well are you sure? In spaghetti sauce?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Tomatoes.
Dr. Stewart: Is it the garlic, is it the onions, is it the tomatoes, what is it?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Oh. Well to me it’d be the tomato sauce, I guess.
Dr. Stewart: Well if you don’t have tomatoes, then you just have a bunch of brown garlic and onion.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: And herbs. The answer is they’re all important.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: You understand? So the whole idea is that’s the way nutrition works. All of these things work together and so it’s kind of like tasting a soup. If you leave out certain ingredients in any type of recipe, the soup doesn’t taste as good. What we want to know is where and what nutritional elements are you having specific trouble, yourself, in delivering or basically having proper levels to make the soup taste perfect.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Well let me…
Dr. Stewart: Do you understand?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Let me ask you a question this way. CoQ10 is very popular for a lot of people, but if you just take CoQ10 by itself, is that going to deliver appropriately?
Dr. Stewart: The answer is it delivers to a certain degree. What we’re really learning is genetically what CoQ10 is involved in is basically the mitochondrial function of the cell.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: The energy?
Dr. Stewart: Your correct. Your creating energy in what we call the respiratory chain. The respiratory chain is basically five steps in the mitochondria that lead to energy production. Now CoQ10 is used in step one and three…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Of that five step process. The problem is that we’re learning that there’s genetic defects or weaknesses in those steps, okay? We basically have several forms. CoQ10 is the base form. The useful form is called ubiquinol. The oxidized form is called ubiquinone.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: So we’ve been using ubiquinone in our products?
Dr. Stewart: Ubiquinone gets converted back to ubiquinol and that’s the one that’s used, but what’s happening is we’re changing hydrogen molecules and that’s how the mitochondria work, we create a flux of hydrogen molecules. What we’re doing is we want to deliver more, but what we’re learning is that there’s ways for us to manipulate that system to make it more effectively. So you can measure your blood levels of ubiquinol or CoQ10, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us that there’s proper function in the cell.
What we’re now interested in is what’s going on where it really needs to be important, not how you’re delivering it. Not what your levels are, but how can you utilize it at the cell.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Is that where genetic testing can come in?
Dr. Stewart: That’s where genetics come in.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Well we’re going to take a quick break here because I have a lot more questions for Dr. Stewart. This is his background with the making of the formulas. So we will be right back with Coffee With Dr. Stewart.
[Commercial Break]
Kara Stewart-Mullens: No two people are the same. Our health issues and our nutritional needs are as unique as our smiles. That’s why our mission at Neurobiologix is simple. Provide quality nutrition that changes lives one formula at a time. Developed through a collaboration with top U.S. physicians, each Neurobiologix formula carefully targets specific health issues.
Speaker1: I can’t tell you how much supplementation has helped our family. Being able to put back in their bodies what they were missing? We had dramatic results. We had focus in school, we had children that weren’t able to sleep through the night. We had children that had their moods regulated.
Dr. Stewart: What we’re interested more in Neurobiologix is replenishing the insufficiencies that the body has in order to recover the underlying problem and re-establish the nervous system and immune system to normal function.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Each of us is unique. Shouldn’t your supplement be too? Neurobiologix. We are changing lives one formula at a time.
[End Commercial Break]
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Alright and we are back. I am Kara Stewart-Mullens, your host, with Coffee With Dr. Stewart and we are talking about supplementation. Basically like supplementation 101. We’re talking with the expert here, Dr. Kendall Stewart. We left the last portion on CoQ10 and we got a little bit through it. He was explaining the delivery process and it’s amazing how many processes these nutritional products or ingredients take to get delivered into the proper form and into the body. Correct?
Dr. Stewart: Right. Correct.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. So we had a lot of questions about statins and CoQ10. A lot of doctors now are realizing you need to take CoQ10 when you’re on a statin. Is that correct?
Dr. Stewart: The answer in theory that’s certainly correct. Here’s how you got to put it together. Sterols which is cholesterol and basically are the precursors to steroids which start with prednisolone and go to progesterone and onto your testosterone…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: The hormones?
Dr. Stewart: And your cortisol and aldosterone and all these different things. So most of the steroids are actually in and around the mitochondria. Now the way statins work to reduce your cholesterol is essentially by blocking a step in your mitochondria that produces cholesterol.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Is that why you’re not a fan or…
Dr. Stewart: That’s (laughing)…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Is that it is a catch 22 question?
Dr. Stewart: The answer is that’s a catch 22 question. Now what we know is in people who have genetic weaknesses in certain steps in the mitochondria that are using CoQ10, which is a quinolone, basically we know that those people who get on statins lose most of their CoQ10 function.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Ah…
Dr. Stewart: Then that creates all the bad side effects like myopathies, brain fog, etc., etc.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: That’s why CoQ10 is such a popular nutrient, right?
Dr. Stewart: That’s correct. Now what we’re learning is that there is actually a much more potent form of CoQ10 called PQQ.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah. We just added that to one of our formulas.
Dr. Stewart: Yeah. You’re going to learn that PQQ is actually much more potent, much more effective and it has a very unique ability that really has not been found in any other supplement to actually tell yourself to make more mitochondria.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Now does it work in conjunction with CoQ10?
Dr. Stewart: Yeah. So CoQ10 is a power Quinone.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: CoQ10 is co-quinone10 and it basically just describes the chain biochemically on the molecule. What we want to do is to use the most effective form of CoQ10 because it relates to how effectively the cell has energy. We’re learning that energy plays a huge role.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So basically what I tell you is that the brain uses 40 percent of the energy of the body.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: The muscles use 20, the immune system uses 20, and the rest of the body uses 20.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Okay? That’s just kind of a simple way to think about it. So I want you to think about a 90-year-old lady.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: Okay. So her batteries are starting to wear out.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Really wear out.
Dr. Stewart: Okay? So what goes south?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: The body.
Dr. Stewart: The brain first.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: The brain. Yeah. Then the body.
Dr. Stewart: Okay? Then the body, the muscles, and then the immune system. Do you understand?
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: So what we know is that people who essentially live longer more quality lives typically have a little bit higher mitochondrial function or a greater number of mitochondria.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: I’m so glad you explained that because we have a product now, PQQ, and I have no idea what to say to people.
Dr. Stewart: Right. So basically what it’s been shown to do, by some fairly elegant research of University of California Davis, and you’re going to start hearing a lot about this because everybody’s really interested in this in Parkinson’s, is that if we can tell a cell to make more mitochondria, then it’s better to have eight batteries in a cell than four batteries.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah because the mitochondria are the batteries of the cells.
Dr. Stewart: The batteries of the cell and they’re essential for life.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So the whole idea is if we have, what I would tell most of my patients, that if you are going to take a statin, you’re probably going to want to be on PQQ or Q10 combination.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Gotcha. Okay. That makes perfect sense. I understand that. The next thing I want to talk to you about is minerals. Minerals are extremely important and we get a lot from foods and things like that. There are a lot of people that feel that they have mineral deficiencies and so give us your opinion on that please.
Dr. Stewart: The mineral deficiency is kind of a funny term.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: The thing with minerals are co-factors in the body.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: They’re used for specific functions in the body.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah. They talk about thyroid gland, immune system, muscle function, red blood cells, and bone health.
Dr. Stewart: Right. So they are essential co-factors meaning that they are needed to help things happen. Now there’s been a little bit of conflicting understanding biochemically in this. People will tell you; “Oh you need zinc,” or; “oh you need lots of calcium,” or “you like lots of magnesium”. Yeah. Well those can help us, okay? The problem is that many people hope that if we put in extra minerals that we get more function from a specific function.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Oh I gotcha. You’re just trying to keep it functioning well.
Dr. Stewart: Yes. You’re supposed to. Deficiencies in minerals, not having enough, can keep an enzyme from not working as well.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Having extra minerals does not mean that you can actually keep an enzyme working better than it’s already programmed to.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. So selenium supports thyroid, but it’s not going to fix your thyroid?
Dr. Stewart: What it does is it supports what’s called deiodinase, the conversion of T4 which is the pool of thyroid to the most active form which is called T3. So by having too little selenium, that will keep you from converting to T3.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Ah.
Dr. Stewart: We add selenium to those patients to try to make sure that enzyme works to its potential.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: Now some people have weaknesses in that conversion and you can put all the selenium you want in there…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And it won’t work?
Dr. Stewart: And it won’t work because there’s a genetic weakness. So really what we’re getting to now is instead of saying everybody needs to be on calcium, magnesium, zinc, selenium, and everybody, you know…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: That is big overkill.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah and you always talk about genetic weakness. I just want to clarify for everybody. Genetic weakness he’s talking about when he gets a genetic testing report back and you see that mutation on that SNP. So you know what they’re going to need or not need. This is not just guessing.
Dr. Stewart: So basically what’s happened is over the past five years, a major change has happened. We have made much less expensive, much easier machines for determining DNA testing.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So 1,096 known genetic variations are found in the enzymes of the human body according to the 1,000 genome project. We have a way to actually genetically test anybody and we find out what your specific weaknesses are versus what my specific weaknesses are.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah. With a little cheek swab.
Dr. Stewart: Even though we’re siblings, ours is different because we didn’t get the same roll of the dice from our parents.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: Okay? So what we want…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well you definitely got the smarter side…
Dr. Stewart: Well…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And I got the…
Dr. Stewart: And you got the beautiful side…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Haha (laughing) thanks.
Dr. Stewart: And the taller side. Okay? So the long and the short of it, is that we really want to know now instead of saying oh well this drug works in a population of 5,000 people and we have this many side effects and this many successes.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: You don’t know what their mutations were?
Dr. Stewart: What we want to know is how is it going to work in you.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: I gotcha. That’s why I love that medicine is going down specification, like the genetic side.
Dr. Stewart: And so typically what we want to know, we can put in minerals and minerals are very important, don’t get me wrong, but you’ve also got to know where there’s a weakness because unfortunately many people think well if I take selenium…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: My thyroid will be healthier. That doesn’t necessarily always hold true.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: A lot of people take a mineral complex so that’s kind of like you’re covering a little bit of the bases and that couldn’t be a bad product?
Dr. Stewart: Most of that’s really about their diet.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Ah. I gotcha. Well that kind of leads into, again, people go; “oh my gosh, I eat a good diet and all that, but with all the processed foods and all the pesticides in everything, I mean is it necessary to take a multi-vitamin?”
Dr. Stewart: The answer is if you’re really eating good fruits and vegetables and no meat…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Clean?
Dr. Stewart: And you’re eating clean, you probably don’t necessarily need to. Now sometimes there can be absorption problems, there can be delivery problems. So what we have to do is know where your specific problems are. It does not mean that you need to take every vitamin and mineral on the market.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah. There’s a lot of people who do.
Dr. Stewart: So that’s what’s really important to me, the focused products that are specifically needed for you.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: We’re not in the business of handing you everything that we can think of so you’re carrying around a bunch of bottles. That is not what…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Well and that’s why your formulas work because the co-factors for the delivery.
Dr. Stewart: Right.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: You have kind of designed this for your patient base who have these types of genetic weaknesses.
Dr. Stewart: Well because I’m the chemist and they’re not.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: That is how simple it is. The whole idea is it’s trying to make it easy and it’s also less expensive for the patient and easier to keep up with.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. To my next question. I want to ask about vitamin D. I get this all the time from people; “Well my vitamin D level came out low, how much should I take?” There is a lot of conflicting research.
Dr. Stewart: The RDAs have nothing to do with how well it’s transported. So there are vitamin D receptors, there’s two of them…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: The VDR Taq and that mutation?
Dr. Stewart: The VDR BSM and so what happens is those have to grab the vitamin D and deliver it. We know that many people don’t do that very well.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay.
Dr. Stewart: So those people have to take highly absorbable high levels of it to get their levels even up to normal.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And they have to take it with K?
Dr. Stewart: K helps the absorption in that round. Now the whole idea is the RDAs have no concept in genetics, no concept in polymorphisms…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: And differences among people. They’re just saying; “This is what we think you should take.” So RDAs are the government stepping in and saying basically; “This is what we think people should take.”
Kara Stewart-Mullens: For the general public?
Dr. Stewart: For the general public.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: They’re trying to be very safe too.
Dr. Stewart: They’re ultra safe.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Ultra safe. Well they kind of have to be. We all have to follow the label guidelines. We’re certified by the Natural Science Foundation. We have to follow GMP guidelines.
Dr. Stewart: Yeah. I’m not going to criticize the government, but those RDAs were determined a long time ago. Vitamin D has recently changed within the last few years as far as the normal levels, you know, I’m not trying to criticize the government, but if you know genetics, it is different for different people. RDA is not specific…
Kara Stewart-Mullens: For everyone?
Dr. Stewart: For everybody.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Well then that leads me to my last point then we’re going to have to close the show. Gosh, we ran out of time. So let’s say that you feel that you need to take supplements and you’re on current medications, we get this question all the time and we cannot answer medical questions. We do not know prescriptions and if it’s going to be safe with vitamins. I mean what do you tell those people? I always say you have to talk to your doctor or your pharmacist.
Dr. Stewart: Oh you have to. You have to talk to your doctor or pharmacist.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Because vitamin K might interfere with a blood thinner, that’s a common one, I guess. We are not allowed to give out any of that information.
Dr. Stewart: The experts in that are your pharmacist.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah they seem to know that because they have that huge log.
Dr. Stewart: They have a huge log because nobody can know them all and so that’s what you do. You call your pharmacist and you ask.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. Because a lot of people are like; “I don’t want to go back to my doctor.” He doesn’t know much about supplementation or this and that so the pharmacist would be your best…
Dr. Stewart: And I would tell you that you probably need a new doctor.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: But what I will also tell you, the pharmacists are going to be the experts.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah. I love my pharmacist too because they always seem to be very helpful. They are very knowledgeable. They are trained just as well as some doctors out there maybe.
Dr. Stewart: Well they’re trained in medicines and interactions.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Yeah.
Dr. Stewart: That’s their job.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: That’s their forte. Alright one quick question that we keep getting. Once I take probiotics for a few months, will the positive bacteria remain in my system and permanently stay or do I have to keep taking them?
Dr. Stewart: I wish that was true.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Me too.
Dr. Stewart: That’s a big question. There’s a lot more involved. We actually secrete a good sugar into our bowel called a fucosyl sugar to attract good bacteria. Many people do not secrete that.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: That’s the beta-glucans we’ve talked about?
Dr. Stewart: Yeah. So that sugar is very important so the answer is no. In most people who have gut issues and need probiotics, the answer is they will never set up a normal colony.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Just like methylation. It never fixes permanently.
Dr. Stewart: Also, we eat a lot of things and we drink water that’s chlorine purified and so there are many ways for us to kill and destroy those bacteria and the best way is just to keep replenishing them.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: Okay. So that answers that question, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate your time today. Thank you Dr. Stewart for all your wisdom.
Dr. Stewart: You’re very welcome.
Kara Stewart-Mullens: And I hope everybody has a blessed and beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 2:
This show is intended for general information and entertainment purposes only. Dr. Stewart serves as the chief science officer and lead formulator for Neurobiologix and advises you to consult with your own medical professional on any information given during this programming. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease or medical condition.
