Lessons - Every Health Myth Exposed in 90 Minutes | Dr. Eric Berg - 12M Subscribers & #1 Health Channel on YouTube

In this lessons episode, discover how metabolomics can reveal what is happening inside the body in real time. Understand why personalized nutrition may outperform one-size-fits-all diets. Explore how deeper metabolic testing can uncover deficiencies and early warning signs. And uncover why targeting root causes could reshape preventive healthcare. When you think about, okay, so there's education, but taking it a step further. So talk to me about metabolomics. What is metabolomics? I want to understand sort of like from a deeper level. So from what I understood, and listen, this is me researching before this podcast. This is not me being a subject matter expert in this by any means. But it's just helping you understand like... how you react and is that on a biological level? Is that, is certain genes or DNA, maybe they react to different foods in different ways or is there like one diet that really everybody could subscribe to that would be better? Are some people easier to, do some people I guess operate better when they eat garbage food? I'm just very curious about what this sort of, this science or this study or this practice sort of unlocks. Metabolomics is going to be the wave of the future for medicine. You probably heard of genomics, which they talk about the gene therapy. People get their DNA tested, and that was supposed to be the thing that was going to just change medicine forever, right? There's like 20,000 to 25,000 genes. That's a lot of data. There's a lot to look at, but it only tells you potentially what could happen. So then as things evolved, and I'm going to skip a couple steps and go right to metabolomics, which you're basically taking a lot more information... from your blood or your urine that goes way beyond just a simple blood test and looks deeper into your chemistry. So if I were able to look deeper into the chemistry and see all the different steps, so if you do a blood test, maybe you have, I don't know, 15 to 20 things you're looking at. But then when you metabolomics, you have 3,000. So you can actually get a picture of the dynamics of what's happening from the assembly line, from food all the way down to waste and all the different factors. So you can get a real good real-time picture of what's happening now. to your body from your diet, your lifestyle, your stress, everything together, real time, what's happening? Let's just take the mitochondria, which is the energy factory of the cell. You have like 12 little steps there that basically go from food into energy. Okay. And each step has certain enzymes that help make this chemical change from one thing to the next. If you can measure each one of those and see where the bottlenecks are, you can then see what's missing. For example... For an enzyme to work, this is where you need vitamins and minerals. People don't realize that. But vitamins and minerals actually help the enzymes to convert one thing to another. So I consume a really healthy diet, but they found I was severely deficient in vitamin C. I'm like, wait a second, I have normal vitamin C in my blood. Yeah, but the demand is so high because I run up hills, and so my body sucks it up. So to be able to see if you have sufficient nutrients, if it's all working, that's way more important than what's going on in your blood. You can have... you could have like bone loss, osteoporosis, and have normal calcium in the blood. It doesn't really... The blood is kind of the... Is not the best place to identify problems because the body will compensate and things like that. I mean, just today, we did a metabolomic testing on my dad, who's in his 80s. And his doctor found his too much vitamin D in his blood. Okay? So he said, stop taking vitamin D. I'm sorry, B12. And... Then we looked at his metabolomic test. He was like severely deficient in B12. Well, first of all, when you take a B12 supplement and then you go to the doctor and get it tested, it's going to show high amounts in your blood because you just took it. In fact, it'll stay in your blood for like seven days. So to be able to see at the cell level what's really going on, That's very valuable. I wish I had this when I was in practice because it takes the mystery about what's really going on with your metabolism on a whole, not just like weight loss, but your overall health. amazing information and then do this over time to keep improving it. And so that way we don't have to put everyone on the same diet. We can just use this testing to tell us what they need more of or less of. Because everyone, you know, some people respond on this diet and this diet. It's like you can't put everyone on the exact same thing. One thing, my father, the big thing about him is like he's severely low on protein. I mean, he has no amount of protein, but you can see it's muscle wasting. But on his mitochondria, there's hardly any protein going into that little feedback loop. So it's very valuable. And I think going into the future, if a doctor could use that, I mean, this would change everything. Because now you're not focusing on disease. You're focusing on, okay, how can we create more health versus... I understand. oh, let's treat this symptom with a drug, but you haven't even looked at the root cause. You haven't even addressed the diet. I mean, like, why would you want to do that? It doesn't make sense. So there's a lot of value in having the data to tell us what's going on for real and going deeper. When you look at... So you answered all my questions. So there's no one diet that solves every problem for every person that's better or worse. It's really at the... Metabolomics really unlocks... all the things that are broken within our bodies as to why whatever we're eating is not doing the job that it's supposed to be doing. So there is a massive amount. Yeah. Yeah. If you have like initially, like most people have insulin resistance and they have weight problems and there might be a pre-diabetic. And so of course we want to, they're not very metabolically flexible. So they can't handle any sugar at all. So you have to get them off carbs and stuff. But, You do that over a period of time, and now they're in much better shape. They can handle healthier carbs. And so we're not talking about putting them on a lot, but they have more flexibility over time once they start healing the system. And depending on... I mean, just think about how many... It's so hard to do a test to determine what everyone needs as far as a diet because you also have... Like... You have Asians. You have people from different parts of the world that have, their whole generations have lived on different types of food. So you can't, you know, what's good for some people is not actually ideal for another person. So you really, you have to look at the whole picture. And the bottom line is, if we could, since most diseases exist, are at the mitochondrial level, if we could just get that thing to work, then whatever that person's doing, it's going to be successful. Is that what I was going to say? No, I was going to ask. I was going to say, what diseases can you sort of look at? There's like a biomarker or a signal of an increased risk of some sort of disease or health problem. What can you look for with this type of test? You just answered, like cancer, heart disease. When you run these types of tests, you see all the leading indicators for all of these types of diseases, autoimmune, all of it. before they happened. Wow. Decades before they happened. So you can start looking at, oh, wow, high amounts of oxidative stress. Okay, inflammation. Okay, so we're going to have a lot of problems in that area or even insulin resistance or problems with the microbiome or inability to detoxify. So you can predict things with this data, which is super valuable to be able to predict long before you even get a symptom. Wouldn't that be cool? So this goes very well. I mean, let's say for example, you're tired right now, right? I mean, you can drink an energy drink, but there's about 100 different reasons why you're tired. We can find out. We can find out why you're really tired by looking at this test and going, this is why you're tired. Or, no, this is not why you're tired. I will tell you this, and this is really, really important. The worst thing you could possibly do to a patient is to give them the wrong diagnosis. It's kind of like telling your wife what their problem is. It's like you're going to mess things up. You never want to tell, you know what your problem is, honey? Don't ever do that. So with a patient, you got to be very careful not to give them the wrong thing because they will get worse just by that. What would be like the gold standard if you look at the people that are offering this test right now or where people can actually explore this? Because this is the first time I've ever heard of it. And I would assume, I think just because of my background and I played a lot of sports and I focus on health and wellness, that I'm more clocked into this community. than even the average person, than probably that family that you helped buy food at the grocery store. So that being said, I've never heard of this. So where would somebody go to get one of these tests if they want to actually explore? Is it viable for the public? Is it going to cost them 20,000 bucks? Is it something they go to their local doctor? Like, where do they go? It's very, very new. Even though it's been around for a long time, the problem with this testing is you have to understand biochemistry. So it's a little bit like a lot of doctors, even school. I went through pre-med myself. We all just memorized biochemistry. biochemistry and got through. We don't understand it until after you graduate and you relearn it and you have time to play with it and learn it. So there's a little learning curve to biochemistry because you have to be able to understand that. You can't just read this. So there's not a lot of clinics out there. There's one that... There's one really good one that's in Greece. They do check people remotely. That one is really good because they have, you know, they've done 60,000 people so far. So their database, they have the right normals to compare things with. And so that would be one. But I reached out to this group, and I said, listen, let me translate the course in English for you so we can bring it to America and start having doctors learn and get this information, because I think there's a lot of doctors that would want to know the status. So there's an old course. I'm helping them do the course on it. Yeah. more doctors can get trained. So that's happening soon. But in the meantime, you know, there's like this team of nine doctors, they do it all over the world right now. And from Greece and Rome, that's where they're located. But there's not a lot of places, but it's, I mean, last year, there was, I think, 81,000 different research studies on this topic. So it's, It's definitely coming up, and there's a lot of people getting involved with it. They're talking about it. It's called personalized nutrition. But as right now, I wouldn't recommend a lot of different clinics because you have to have the experience. And it's like, okay, you see the test, but now... How do you relate that to the person's diet? And so that's why I like this Dr. In Greece. I feel, you know, I had my parents go there, myself, my family, so I like it. And I personally just, you know, I do YouTube videos. I want to learn everything about it, so I'm physically taking his course now. Just not that I'm going to practice, but I want to know everything about it. And this is a little bit of a learning curve, you know, because you have to understand biochemistry from a whole different level so you can apply it versus memorize it. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.