Dr. J and Evan Brand explain why “low neurotransmitters” (dopamine, serotonin, GABA) are becoming extremely common worldwide.
Their main point: brain symptoms usually stem from upstream issues such as nutrient deficiencies, poor methylation, gut dysfunction, toxins (especially mold), inflammation, and chronic stress. Instead of masking symptoms with caffeine or only medications, they emphasize testing + targeted rebuilding of the biochemical foundations that make neurotransmitters.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marjani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth.com. We have all our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics, ranging from thyroid and hormones to ketogenic diets and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with me, Dr. J
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really wanna get to the root cause of. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free to share the information with friends or family, and enjoy the show. And we are live. It's Dr. Jay here with Evan Brand. Today, we're gonna be talking about chronically low neurotransmitters.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is your brain not working because your neurotransmitters are low? And then we're gonna talk about the root causes of why that may be. Evan, how are we doing, man? Good to see you. Yeah, you too man.
Evan Brand: I'm doing well. And I look at a lot of vote tests where. Maybe five, six years ago, this wasn't the case. But now it seems like everyone has low brain chemistry, and these are firefighters and nurses.
Evan Brand: Mm-hmm. And stay-at-home moms and [00:01:00] tennis players. I mean, you name it, like it's this. This is not a rare thing, and this doesn't affect just one group or one set of the population. This is a pretty widespread issue, and this is across the globe. This is not just an American problem, either. People in Australia, all across Europe, and even in South Africa, I'm testing these people, and everyone has low brain chemistry.
Evan Brand: Now, some argue it's social media. They say, Okay, all the short-form content, we're frying our brains. We've got too much stimulation. We're firing out the dopamine receptors. I don't know, I don't know if I can blame it on. Social media, because you know, even 10 years ago, you, you and I were looking at oats, we're still seeing issues long before people were scrolling.
Evan Brand: So I think it's more so going back to nutrient deficiencies, stress depleting these toxins, depleting these. So we're gonna unpack some of this today, but if you are feeling. Irritable, anxious, worried, overwhelmed, and frazzled easily. You have issues with drive, focus, concentration, and motivation. You get bored easily.
Evan Brand: You feel like you have trouble [00:02:00] relaxing. You need alcohol, chocolate, or something else to relax. Those are signs and symptoms of different categories of neurotransmitters. So what we're gonna do today is break these down and then help you come up with a plan to fix it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Now, one of the first things we need to make our neurotransmitters work is we need to be able to methylate, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And methylation is kind of one of these things that sounds very kinda like, you know, ethereal. Like what, what? What's methylation? Right? So essentially, you have a carbon with three hydrogens, which is what's known as a methyl group. And so our body has to take, basically, people say, oh, you have a methylate, you have methylation problems, is your body binds carbon and three hydrogens to whatever these different processes are, whether it's repairing DNA.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Whether it's turning over neurotransmitters, whether it's helping out with the mitochondrial function, whether it's detoxifying, whether it's generating a TP or energy, your body is constantly using these methyl groups and there's certain I co-factors that are needed for good methylation. So one of the most important things is just a good methylated B vitamin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So [00:03:00] an activated methylated B12, we know like the M-T-H-F-R, right? That's methyl tetrahydrofolate reductase. That's an activated folate. So when you see things like folic acid, if you have methylation issues, you may not even be able to convert and activate that folate, folic acid, into activated folate, into activated L-M-T-H-F folate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so we need activated folate. We need a good quality B6 or a paradoxical 5-phosphate. We need really good quality. B one, thymine B two. Riboflavin. B three niacin. We need magnesium, we need choline, we need zinc. These are all important co-factors that we need to methylate outta the gate.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and most people are deficient in these.
Evan Brand: If you're on a vegetarian or a vegan diet, you're not gonna get enough of those. And so this is why I've personally seen the connection. I've seen enough people who say on their intake form. Yes. Vegan. Yes. Vegetarian or used to be. And mood disorders. More anxiety. Correct. More people experience depression than those who eat meat.
Evan Brand: And this is not a [00:04:00] political thing. People try to turn me into meat or make me a political thing. No, I'm just talking straight, just on the biochemical level here. We're seeing on paper. More vegetarians, more vegans, even Pescatarians. We're seeing lower amino acid input. We're seeing lower neurotransmitters, therefore more anxiety, more thyroid issues.
Evan Brand: Mm-hmm. We're seeing hypothyroidism, and that's connected to the anxiety that's connected to the depression, to the fatigue. So I, I know we try to isolate things, but this whole thing is connected. So if there's an issue with the gut, which we'll get into, that's upstream affecting the brain as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So the first thing we have to look at when it comes to methylation is. Are we getting the nutrients in through a really good, healthy diet, right? Leafy greens, high-quality grass-fed meat, maybe even some organs, perhaps even some seafood. You know, choosing carbo. And then also the next thing is, are we our macro style then?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because we could be doing decent, but if we're doing way too much carbohydrate and we're causing our blood sugar to really surge up and go wonky, like a lot of vegetarian vegans do, because they tend to be. Very, very carb [00:05:00] heavy. It's hard to find a vegetarian or vegan that's getting a hundred grams of protein at least, but they're not also getting, you know, 400 grams of carbohydrates.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's hard, unless you're just relying on protein powders. That's the only way you can do it, which isn't, you know, great if that's your primary source of protein. And so that's a big deal because the higher your carbohydrate intake goes, you're also going to burn through a lot of B vitamins and a lot of magnesium because to process that carbohydrate, the Krebs cycle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Glycolysis involves lots of B vitamins, amino acids, and magnesium to run those processes. And then also, a lot of times if we're eating a lot of vegetarian, vegan things, there's a lot of antinutrients in those foods. And so there may be lots of B vitamins in your so-called whole wheat. But once you factor in the lectins and the phytates and the oxalates and all these antinutrients, you may not be able to access a lot of those vitamins two.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so you may on paper see that, that they're there, but they're really not getting into your body. And then the last thing is, what if we have an M-T-H-F-R issue? Like 70% of the population does. You may need some activation. [00:06:00] Methylated B vitamins, and that's where organic acid testing comes in, 'cause we'll look at fig lu foraminal glutamate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We'll look at methylmalonic acid, we'll look at xanthinuria, a kind of urinate. We'll look at some of these B vitamin markers. We'll look at Krebs cycle intermediary compounds. Markers 22 through 32, 34. On that O test to see how the mitochondria are doing, which can tell us about B vitamins, CoQ10 10 and LA, all these important nutrients.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So very important to make sure we have the methylating nutrients there first from food, second, dialing in our macros. And then third, we may have the supplement on top of that, even if they need to have it. And also if we're having extra toxins from mold. Or heavy metals. Well, now our methyl group needs even higher.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We need even more methylation and more sulfur amino acids, and that really increases the demand. That's where supplements become even more necessary.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. Let's pull this tab up real quick. Yeah. This is just a paper on. A Neurotoxicology journal. This is way back in oh six. You're talking literally 20 years ago, the [00:07:00] acute neurotoxic effects of the fungal metabolite, ritoxin A, which comes from the mold Aspergillus, which is the most common mold, by the way.
Evan Brand: So if you've worked or breathed or lived in a water-damaged building, a school, an office, some kind of apartment complex, right? Aspergillus is the most common mold that's gonna grow. Well, this paper here shows. Right here, this is a dose-dependent reduction, and dopamine, the okra toxin, goes up, so the higher the okra toxin level, the higher the mold toxicity.
Evan Brand: The lower the dopamine. So it says right here at the summary, OTA causes acute depletion of dopamine. Mm. So this has been out there for 20 years. And so it's like when you look at society, the average guy on the street corner, what are they gonna do? They're gonna run into the gas station, they're gonna go get an energy drink, and maybe they're gonna be proud that it's.
Evan Brand: Zero sugar, and it's got aspartame instead. Or maybe it's even a healthy quote, healthy organic energy [00:08:00] drink, and they're just gonna hit the caffeine, and they're gonna think, okay, caffeine is the answer. The reason I'm tired, the reason I'm foggy, the reason I'm a slow starter in the morning is that I have a caffeine deficiency.
Evan Brand: And while caffeine can certainly boost you, it's not actually giving you that truth. Dopamine and mitochondrial energy, such as tyrosine, will. So before I run for, let's say, an energy drink, I'm going to try 500 to 800 milligrams of L-tyrosine, and that's gonna wake you up and actually feed the brain rather than just whipping a tired horse.
Evan Brand: I know you do some coffee. I do a little bit of mushroom coffee, so I'll do maybe 50 milligrams of, of caffeine, but it's not. I'm not using it as a boost. I just like it. It's just good. I just, I like the medicinal mushrooms in there and so I like it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I think that's excellent. Uh, I also find that when you're doing things like coffee, caffeine, I think you have to really be on top of just time releasing the caffeine, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So putting fat in there, putting protein. So I like to use [00:09:00] collagen amino acids. I like to use either a good high-quality butter fat or an MCT oil, something like that, because that's gonna allow any caffeine that comes in. It's a time release and you don't get jittery. You don't have any of these problems if you do it that way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you just gotta be, you know, you gotta use strategy. If you can't even tolerate it like that, then, then you gotta be, you know, maybe avoid it or just cut the caffeine levels down. I wanna share one more thing here. When we look at the methylation cycle, this is important to look at. See if I can get this up here for y'all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This is gonna come up on screen. It's gonna look at the nutrients that are required in the methylation cycle. 'cause most people, when they think about methylation, they're just like, man, it's just, it's just they think folate. They think B12. Know, they, they don't think like the big picture. Okay, so it's a little bit blurry, but this does a really good job.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So here's methionine, which is a key amino acid in a lot of animal products. And you'll see that gets converted to SA dental methionine. And we need glycine here, right? And then you can see the. A methyl group is needed here, and that [00:10:00] methylation then activates our DNA, right? It's activating different DNA.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We need lyse. We need arginine, right? Our lipids are impacted, and then that ental methionine goes to ental, homocysteine, and then homos. Then S than homocysteine goes to homocysteine. Now this is a problem 'cause if we keep it here, if we don't keep this cycle churning, homocysteine is very inflammatory on the blood vessels and on the cardiovascular system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is where we need things like B12. B six right here, serine, uh, cysteine. These help take this homocysteine and channel it down to cysteine and into glutathione. So if we don't churn the cycle properly because of low B vitamins and low sulfur, this can get stuck. And then you can see homocysteine will kind of churn back around.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It involves beans, so even things like. Choline from your animal products or the beta, then the HCL, which is trimethylglycine. That's very important. And then you can see more. B12 is needed here. And then you can see now we go [00:11:00] into the folate cycle, which is tangentially connected. So you can see we need B6 over here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We need more glycine. That is why collagen is so important, serene. So we have full weight, the dihydro folate. To 10 methyl, THF, folate, the T. So it, we need all, so it's for it to churn. Look at all the B vitamins we need here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. We need, lemme just zoom in a little bit more. It's a little fuzzy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We need B two, B three, B six, thymine, riba, fla, ni, niacin, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then we have all of our DNA get activated. This is so important. And then you can see over here we need vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D, zinc, copper, lutein, right? These are all gonna be super high in egg yolks and healthy animal products. So very important. When we look at methylation, we need a lot of different sulfur compounds and vitamins to make that happen.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Any comments? Yeah, I love it, man. I love the picture. I know it gets geeky for folks, but the takeaway is you need eggs if you can tolerate 'em. You need grass-fed meats if you can tolerate 'em. I know some folks, a couple emailed in last week about having [00:12:00] Alpha Gal. They're like, Hey, can you do anything?
Evan Brand: You know, we can't eat beef at all. Yeah, you definitely can. The SAAT is a little needle. It's an acupuncture, a special acupuncture technique. They put a small needle in one of your ears for about three weeks. I know it sounds crazy, but it works. So I would seek out the SAAT. If you do have Alpha G, you're listening to this, you're like, Hey, I'm depressed, I'm anxious.
Evan Brand: I know these bees are important. I know I want my brain to work better, but I can't eat beef. What do I do? To those few people listening, that's what you do, and that should help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and also it all comes back to the gut too, because so much of the hyperimmunity, the hyperallergenicity, your immune system being overreactive to certain foods comes from the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so there's certain foods you like. I tell patients all the time, like, well, I want to eat these foods, and it's well. Let's see. Let's get the gut better. Let's get the inflammation down. Let's get the microbes down. Let's get the healthy, beneficial bacteria up if we have a bunch of microbes, like I had a patient last week who had six or seven different infections, and she was complaining about wanting to add more foods to it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I'm like, well, we gotta knock [00:13:00] all the, we got these six or seven different infections. More than likely, there's gonna be gut permeability, even if we don't see it on the sonu, and there's probably some level of gut permeability happening that's gonna increase the chance of allergenicity. Plus, we have microbes that are.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 10 and even a hundred x above limit. Let's get the microbes better. And then we have to make sure we have good, adequate levels of hydrochloric acid. Also, hydrochloric acid, guess what? It's a methyl donor, right? Trimethylglycine. So it's gonna be important in that methylation cycle. And so we gotta get digestion better, and then over time the immune system can get better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The immune system becomes wound up, right? It becomes totally wound up. As we get the inflammation down, it starts to unwind slowly over time. And then we become less sensitive. And like Evan talks about a lot too. Let's say you have this gut issue, but you've also got a lot of mold around you that can also keep your immune system wound up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you really wanna look at the environment, the air, even if you don't fix the mold, but you just get a really good high-quality air filter, that's gonna help a ton.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. We talked last week about these air scrubbers, so that's a good idea too. Let's go to serotonin. So [00:14:00] serotonin is something that you can measure the metabolites of on the OAT test.
Evan Brand: And the typical symptoms would be irritability, anxiety, worry, OC, d, panic, phobias, and then potential cravings. So it could be alcohol, it could be sugars, it could be starches. So if you have low serotonin number one, we can measure that on paper. But number two, we're not gonna put you on an SSRI or an SNRI or any of those things before we go and.
Evan Brand: Fix the gut-clearing infections and then use specific amino acids. You mentioned five HTP earlier, so that's an amino acid that you can use to rebuild serotonin, and you can feel better in a couple of weeks. So that's the cool thing. Some of the stuff we do, yes, it might take a few months to clear gut bugs.
Evan Brand: It might take a few years to fully clear mold, but we can give people that little glimmer of hope and make them feel better quickly, maybe in two weeks, by using amino acids. So we often don't use 'em in isolation. So we're talking five HTP for serotonin. But we often don't drag that up alone. I saw, I had a, a yoga teacher many, many years ago who she heard about five [00:15:00] htp.
Evan Brand: She's like, Hey, this is a great miracle cure for my depression and anxiety. So she takes it, but she never adds any tyrosine. Mm. And so when we got her oat test, she was super in balance because she had jacked up serotonin to the moon ,and she didn't do anything on the dopamine side. And so then she ended up really lethargic and just, it, it was not good.
Evan Brand: So we wanna do these things in a ratio. This doesn't mean. You should be afraid to use aminos, but you certainly don't wanna drag yourself one direction or the other. In general, we wanna bring these up together, and that's all based on your lab results. This is not just us willy-nilly throwing stuff
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: at you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Now, some of your best methyl donors that we can get going, right? Ental, methionine, and to be a great methyl donor, NAC is gonna be very helpful for glutathione because it's gonna decrease oxidative stress, the more oxidation you have. The more you deplete your methylation. And so think of acetylcysteine and or glutathione precursors and glutathione by itself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It's decreasing the oxidative stress, which is gonna decrease your demand for methyl donors. [00:16:00] And then our big sulfur amino acids like. Like I mentioned here, um, methionine very high in muscle meat or animal products, so you're gonna get that from that. Also, we may, if we have a lot of chronic mood stuff, we may even want a little bit of SA dental methionine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sammy can be very helpful because it does help support some of the methyl donors, but you still need all the precursor building blocks with it. Another one that's really good for methylation is guess what? Creatine. Not too expensive. So a lot of good methadone, like, I'm gonna go right after this. I'm playing pickleball for an hour, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I'm gonna go bang out five to 10 grams. I'm gonna do a buffered creatine, cre alkaline. Very helpful. I've already hit my electrolytes, I've already hit my Mitsy, and a lot of my mitochondrial nutrients, so I'm ready to go. And so Creatine's a great one. So, you know, that's gonna, that's gonna literally support about half of your methylation demand.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You'll be able to support that with a good, high-quality Crete. And then if you're taking. Beta HCL, you're gonna get some trimethylglycine in that, and that's also gonna help [00:17:00] be a good methyl donor as well. And so just taking your hydrochloric acid is also gonna help improve your methylation. That's why I tell patients we prioritize.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I do my practice. I prioritize electrolytes and digestion first. Because that helps everything spawn from that. And plus, if we're not breaking things down, a lot of times we can be very hypersensitive to things. And so that can play a big role as well. And then of course, our animal products like our egg yolks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Again, as long as we're not really sensitive, egg yolks are great, or your grass-fed beef or any of your organs are gonna be very high in choline, which is very important for the brain and for acetylcholine, right? Acetylcholine is really important for the Krebs' cycle. When you look at it essentially, all you have is protein.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You have fats, and you have carbohydrates. They all funnel down from to acetyl-CoA. Right. And acetyl-CoA right is very important to run that kreb cycle. Alright. And so acetylcholine, acetyl-CoA, there's gonna be a connection there.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And this is. [00:18:00] The real root cause way to fix your mood disorder. I just find it odd that even in 2025 going into 26 here, you, you walk into your psychiatrist, they're not bringing up methylation at all, which you people may be listening and going, well, why are you guys hitting methylation?
Evan Brand: Wh why are you talking about methylation? I thought I could just. Take this supplement and, and fix the brain. Well, methylation is one of the key ways that we produce and balance our neurotransmitters. So you have to have these co-factors that Dr. Jay's describing to make this thing work. But when you go into the psychiatrist office, they're not asking, what do you eat for breakfast?
Evan Brand: Do you have eggs? Do you get muscle meats? Do you get organs? It's just, tell me how you're feeling and then boom, here's the prescription. And that misses this whole thing. So could you temporarily feel better and have some of these pharmaceuticals save lives in the mood drug category? Probably, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue.
Evan Brand: So I fear that you may support your mood with a drug, but then you still have [00:19:00] nutrient deficiencies that leads to say, osteoporosis. You've got bone density problems now, or you've got skin conditions now because you don't have enough nutrients for healthy skin, or you've got bowel issues still because you had parasites that were robbing you of your nutrients to begin with.
Evan Brand: Correct. So it's like, yeah, you can go take a drug and maybe feel better on it, but what was actually
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: underneath this? Correct. And I tell patients, right, and I'll use this, there's a a, a Moss B'S Nutrient Drug Deficiency Guide. And I'll look at that because that'll tell me a lot of times what the nutrient deficiencies caused by a certain medication are.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And when you look at any of these psychia psychiatric medications, you're gonna see a massive depletion. The same nutrients that your brain needs to function optimally. And so when you understand that you're depleting your methyl donors, you're depleting all of your B vitamins and certain amino acids, we know neurotransmitters get turned over faster.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So your dopamine. Tyrosine building blocks your five HTP serotonin melatonin building blocks. Your GABA [00:20:00] building blocks are gonna be turned over and depleted faster. And so the problem with that is, I'm not antip psychiatry or brain meds. The problem is they create a loop of dependency. And unless you're working with someone that's gonna support those building blocks and come up with a plan to get you off, at some point, you're gonna be stuck on it and that dose has to go up over time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You talk to any psychiatrist if they're on a medication long enough. Dose goes up and up, which is gonna create more nutrient problems, and then you're gonna be forever dependent. And then do you, do you have that
Evan Brand: chart? That'd be good to look at that chart. Do you have that readily available? I'd like to show people that, and we could just run through it, you know, for audio listeners too.
Evan Brand: But this is huge, huge, huge, huge. And. I would argue the number's quite high. Like eight out of every 10 people we test have either a combination of nutrient deficiencies and or neurotransmitter problems. So I want you all to know that this is not a rare situation at all. A hundred percent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I'll try to pull something up here, but, and also you guys can look at chat GPT as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There's a lot of good. Methods up there, a lot of [00:21:00] good modalities that will show, hey, these are the most common drugs, right? And that we know certain drugs like statins will deplete coq 10. We know certain beta blockers and blood pressure medication will deplete magnesium. We know even some of the insulin sensitizing compounds like metformin, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or Glucophage that depletes B12, right? These are very, very important compounds for. Our brain functioning optimally.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I just found a paper here that was interesting. Lemme see if I can pull this up for you. This one is in nutrients 2023 and it's titled, uh, dietary Nutrient Deficiencies and Risk of Depression.
Evan Brand: So this is a review here. And it was saying that deficiencies in protein B, vitamins, vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, selenium, iron, calcium, Omega-3, significant impact on brain and nervous system function, which can affect the appearance of depressive symptoms. So I'm sure this goes on and on to get deeper and geekier.
Evan Brand: That is your, that is your summary, and we know that this is growing in kids too. So we see a lot of kids that [00:22:00] are nutrient deficient as well, and that's because their mother's a nutrient deficient even going into the pregnancy because the soil's depleted. So this is like a multi-generational problem now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is. And the problem with a lot of this, Evan, is that most people think their average medical doctor knows a lot about nutrition. Frankly, they know almost nothing about nutrition, nothing. So I had conversations with a handful of Stanford medical students back in the day and I said, Hey, you know, what are you guys learning right now?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nutrition? And they were like. We have an online class that's one to two credits on nutrition, and it's just about diseases of nutrition. Like, oh, scurvy, right? Low vitamin C, you can get scurvy and hemorrhaging of the vascular blood vessels, or hey, B one, berry, berry, and that can cause cardiac arrest, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it's like extreme nutrient deficiencies and the diseases they cause. Night blindness and eye health issues with in incredibly low vitamin A. Right? And so that's fine, but those are the extreme. That's not anything functional. And so your average [00:23:00] functional med, your average, your average medical doctor knows virtually nothing about nutrition.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so when you look at drugs and their nutrient deficiencies, they will know nothing about that or what's the adequate right diet? Well, they're gonna typically go with the standard of care, which is the food pyramid or. The MyPlate, whatever they changed it to, which, you know, for the longest time at eight to 12 servings of grains a day, or eight to 10 servings of grains a day, and tend to tend to do more demonized fat, which we know is, is not correct anymore.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, yeah, just, you gotta be, be mindful of that. The building blocks are vitally important. Now, I wanted to highlight here, most people, even when they eat good things, they may have a lot of. You know, poor deficiencies from the acid and enzyme and bile standpoint, and so just because you eat those things, we have to make sure that you're able to break it down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I can't tell you how often I see on GI maps, high levels of scrt or low enzymes or acid levels, and so we have to make sure that we can actually digest and break things down and make sure we're chewing foods up. Well, I can't tell you how many kids I see. It's like 1, 2, 3. Two swallow. Man, you need to break your food down more [00:24:00] and masticate and chew it so you can create more surface area for those enzymes and assets to work.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Let's pull this up real quick. Yeah. Let's show people the page four, what you're referring to. So this is a GI map here on a guy. Let me look back at his symptoms real quick 'cause this might be helpful. Uh, so 30 5-year-old guy here, fatigue, brain fog, bowel function issues, frequent urination. So on the gi, uh, h pylori rise there.
Evan Brand: So yeah, that's, that's a lower stomach acid right there. Got a handful of bugs here, but what you were talking about on page four right here, we can look at these, the autocrats creeping up and then we see the pancreatic elastase is too low. So this is the recipe for the typical guy who says, Hey, I'm eating well.
Evan Brand: Why do I still have these issues? Well, look it right here. It, your digestive system is clearly not working
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: optimally. Plus he has some mild gut inflammation with that. Calprotectin F 50, and that's Ther's. Just a sign of, you know, not breaking down that fat. And then he's got very weakened, you know, on the weaker side of the immune response.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I'll see some patients that'll [00:25:00] say, oh look, his anti glyadin that's a gluten antibody is good. It's like, well, you could still be sensitive to gluten just because you're not making an antibody via the immunoglobulin. A, you could still have other T-cell or other antibody immunity. Um, um, mediated responses.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you still gotta be careful of gluten and grains too.
Evan Brand: Just for fun, since we talked about mold, dang, this is page one on the OAT test. So for folks listening on audio, even on page one of the oat, you could see life, you know, life changing information here about fungal infections, sky high candida overgrowth here.
Evan Brand: Let's look at the brain chemistry just to see how this all connects. You see the mitochondrial issues here. Brain chemistry somehow actually looks kind of good like this hitting horrible.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just a little bit. Elevation on the, on the dopamine burning. Little bit there and then nutrient
Evan Brand: levels. So B six was zero, vitamin C's pretty low.
Evan Brand: So I mean, this guy was trying, he was trying hard, I mean, he was taking a lot of, a lot of different supplements already when he, when he came in, but, and you
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: go back, show me, show me Marcus. 22 through 32. I wanna see energy production. See where is he at? So he is got 22. Okay, so [00:26:00] lactate, ovates decent. So scenic acids.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: High two OxyGo Teric, low Citrix. So he's got three really outta whack markers in that mitochondrial section. Plus he's got that amino. Yeah, so he's got five, five outta nine there, five outta eight, kind of outta whack. So there's definitely some energy production issues there. Yeah. And
Evan Brand: so one of his main complaints, fatigue and brain fog, and that absolutely can be found root cause.
Evan Brand: Through stool and urine. Can we do blood work? Sure. Does blood work help you with the stuff we're talking about? Maybe, but honestly, if you have a coin and you're flipping it, I mean, I, I, I hope that you're gonna land on getting the functional labs done because Sure. I see these, these blood test companies now as getting kind of trendy and cool and I'm even seeing these ads, these girls walking on the sidewalk.
Evan Brand: I got my blood test done and it showed dah, dah, dah. Which great blood can be amazing for cancer markers ca 1 25 and ca 19. Some of these like tumor markers and um, you mentioned, uh, homocysteine, we talk vitamin [00:27:00] D, um, CRP levels, maybe some lipid panel stuff. But overall, if you're trying to actually fix your mood.
Evan Brand: There's not a ton on blood for me, that's really gonna help me figure out mood, gut anxiety type issues. What? What would you say? Maybe anemia would explain anxiety, but what
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: else? It has to be more extreme to come up in blood. I mean, you can look at it and and maybe get some tendencies from it, but you'd still wanna follow up with some of the testing we're talking about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But of course, like if we see low red blood cells, low hemoglobin, low hematocrit, right? Especially if we're dealing with a female. Maybe has heavy menstrual flow or anyone that has really crummy digestion or just someone vegan, vegetarian. We may see the low hemoglobin hematocrit, uh, red blood cells, which can be a sign of a microcytic anemia.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That means small red blood cells and due to a lack of iron. Right? And then we could also see. Macrocytic anemias are megaloblastic. It could be pernicious in nature where there's autoimmunity impacting the parietal cells of the stomach, so we're not binding up B12 and then grabbing it at the end of the [00:28:00] small intestine in the ileum.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so we may see high M-C-H-M-C-H-C-M-C-V, of course, higher levels of homocysteine can tell us some methylation problems. We may also just see, hey, look, our serum protein. Is, you know, in the mid to low sixes, we may see lower bun, we may see, um, lower creatinine. Those could be some signs of lower protein.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if I see lower protein signs, I'm gonna assume that we're not making acid and enzymes and other nutrients are also not absorbing well too. Yeah,
Evan Brand: well
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: said.
Evan Brand: So you can extract info from blood. However, it's not enough though. It just says,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: okay, let's now do this. So it wouldn't be enough for me to say, Hey, this is, this is it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I want other testing too. But it can give you a pretty good idea, especially if it's extreme.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Well said. So we want you to get an oat, we want you to get a gi, I mean, those are kind of the baseline things you should be doing. Correct. So, I know if you get bogged down with some of this geeky methylation talk, the takeaway is simple.
Evan Brand: Get an oat, get a GI once a year. Look for infections. Look for nutrient [00:29:00] deficiencies. Look for brain chemistry imbalances that you can use. Specific herbals, botanicals, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, whatever we need to do to fix all those roadblocks to your healing and happiness. In our optimal state as humans, you can feel happy and joyful and energetic and calm and not require substances to get you to that level.
Evan Brand: The problem is all of us are so messed up now that we forgot what normal is like. So we get used to this suboptimal level of performance and we just think this is just the way I am. Uh, it's hormones, it's menopause, it's aging. I'm just getting old, blah, blah, blah. No. You can thrive and you can make your brain work so good that you literally run laps around everyone else.
Evan Brand: And that's why we do this. We do this because we want you to be the best version of yourself. So you could be the best dad, you could be the the best husband, you could be the best friend, the best entrepreneur, the best, CEO, the best worker, the best, you [00:30:00] know, housewife. Like all these things that we're talking about are not just for you to geek out on.
Evan Brand: We want this to translate into you being able to play and engage with your kids. Correct. But if you have low serotonin, you're gonna be so overloaded from a sensory perspective. You're gonna be so irritable, you don't wanna play with your kids, or maybe you wanna start this new project, or maybe you've got your garage so full of stuff that you can't even park your cars in it.
Evan Brand: We want you to have the motivation to be able to declutter. Get rid of things you don't need. But when your brain chemistry is stuck in a fog, either from, like you saw on the oat test here, a candida issue or a mold issue, or uh, low amino acids, you're going to be stuck. And this is why people become hoarders.
Evan Brand: We could do a whole episode on like, why do you do the things you do? Sure there's trauma and, you know, sentimental value to stuff people hold, hold onto. But if you think about a high performer. In general, you're, you're probably not a hoarder. You're probably able to clear your mind, clear the clutter in both [00:31:00] your physical and your mental world to perform at your best, correct?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And I wanted to highlight one more thing. Those are all valid, very valid points. We talked about the nutrients, we talked about the gut. We talked about some of the amino acid building blocks, right? We talked about. Um, five HTP slash serotonin building blocks, which also then converts downstream to your melatonin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sleep hormones. We talked about tyrosine or phenylalanine. Tyrosine. Tyrosine to L-dopa, L-DOPA to dopamine. Very important. I also wanna talk about the glutamate aspect. So when your brain becomes overly inflamed, you make this neurotransmitter compound called glutamate, and that glutamate hits the. NMDA receptor site and the A MPA receptor site to the brain, that's ethyl d aspartate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so that when that becomes overactive, it creates this electrical surge, right, where the brain can't calm down. People that are OCD have a hard time focused, they can't relax, right? And it's gonna create overstimulation in the brain. It's also gonna impact the [00:32:00] mitochondria. Create mitochondrial stress.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It'll create free radical damage. It's gonna damage that cell membrane. You're gonna have less a TP production, right? So you're, why would it get messed
Evan Brand: up if people are listening? They're like, okay, how? How do I end up with
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: a glutamate issue? So the first thing is you're eating really crummy foods, whether it's mono, Soto, sodium glutamate, aspartame, artificial sweeteners, and of course, if you're eating those things, you're gonna be potentially eating things like gluten or just inflammatory foods, junky seed oils.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: These are gonna create inflammation. Inflammation on the guts. Creates permeability issues in the gut via the tight junctions. And that same permeability can then cross over to the astrocytes of the brain, which is essentially the blood brain barrier. And when that starts to become more permeable, then you get these reactive oxygen species.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You're gonna get reactive nitrogen species, you're gonna see nuclear factor cap beta. You're gonna see Cox Pathways, you'll see these microglial, which are the immune cells of the brain. And when they're overactive in the brain, you're gonna be tired. You're gonna be. Fatigued, [00:33:00] you're gonna have brain fog.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so it's a vicious cycle, right? And so as we have gut issues, we have brain issues, as we have brain issues, it feeds back and creates more gut issues. It's a vicious cycle. And so we need nutrients to actually calm that down. So things like thine and acetylcysteine, things that bring down the oxidation, glutathione's great, but it does not cross the blood brain barrier well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Um, and so we need things, even gaba. Especially if someone already has brain permeability, GABA can still be very helpful to calm down the glutamate, and then it takes that glutamate and it can bring it downstream, the gaba, which becomes the break. Now the brain can relax more, but again, if you have lipopolysaccharides from bad bacteria or you mention fungal overgrowth, and the acid aldehyde is a byproduct that can impact the cell Saol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cell saol is a compound that overstimulates the midbrain and creates dopamine issues in the brain. Right. That's how candida can cause problems, right? And then of course, the root causes to all this stuff. H pylori, [00:34:00] sibo, bacterial overgrowth, parasites, potential mold issue, chronic food allergens, right? So it's a lot of things, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's why it's really good. We're putting a lot of information out here. Try to grab a one or two things that you can work on, but if you get overwhelmed, you know you can reach out to evan@evanbrand.com. Or myself, Dr. j@justinhealth.com. We see this all the time. We've been seeing probably together over 10,000 patients for the last 15 years, and so we are skilled to be able to dive in and work with patients that are dealing with these exact things.
Evan Brand: And it's fun. It's fun. Okay. I know some of this gets geeky. You might get bogged down by it, but we make it simple. Once we look at your labs, we'll make you a custom protocol that makes sense for your specific issues. This is not cookie cutter stuff that we're doing. Everything is case specific, the dosages.
Evan Brand: The forms. Are we, are we doing capsules? Are we doing powders? Are we doing liquids? Is it for kids? Is it for adults? So everything is gonna be dosed out the way it needs to so that you can look at your protocol, dial that in, tweak some of the diet modifications we need to do, and then boom, you're on your way to being the best version of yourself.
Evan Brand: So yeah, reach [00:35:00] out if you need help, justin health.com, evan brand.com. We're happy to help you all and we love doing this. So wherever you are in the world, we have distribution worldwide, so just. Reach out. Don't be shy. We'll be happy to help and you're gonna have fun in the process. Most importantly, you're gonna learn how to actually fish.
Evan Brand: You know? That's our goal. Teach you how to fish. Yeah. So that you know when you're feeling low, you can bring this in or bring that in and feel better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And there aren't a lot of functional medicine practitioners, in my opinion, that are skilled to look at testing and assessing mold in someone's house.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mold in someone's body how to successfully and cost effectively remediate mold in a house to decrease the mold mycotoxins, how to clean things. And so because Evan and I have had our own health challenges and our old mold challenges, we know exactly how to do it and we have to, we know how to do it in a very cost effective way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you have mold issues, it's really overwhelming when people are telling you things cost tens of thousands of dollars where there may be cheaper alternatives that that can be done.
Evan Brand: For sure, for sure. Yeah. Fear is not good. So let us help you cut through the fear. Mm-hmm. Some people use fear to, uh, I don't know, [00:36:00] sell if you will, or, or motivate people, but that's, that's not how we roll.
Evan Brand: We wanna just give you the data and help you walk through it. So be happy to help you guys. Ple, please reach out evan brand.com. Justin health.com book call. We'll be here. Alright guys, have an awesome one, you guys. Take care. Have a good one, Evan. Peace bro. Bye bye.
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