519 Is It My Genes? Functional Medicine Dr. Laurie Marti On Working With Your Gene Expressions To Reverse Disease, MTHFR, Fibromyalgia, ADHD, Detox

Learn True Health with Ashley James

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Dr. Laurie Marti's Website: www.lauriemartimd.com

519: Understanding Disease Reversal Through Gene Expressions

https://learntruehealth.com/understanding-disease-reversal-through-gene-expressions/

In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, we delve into the complex world of genetics and health, focusing on the vital connection between gene enzymes like MTHFR and overall wellness. Our expert guest unpacks the role of supportive genes and explains why some people experience heightened anxiety, sleeplessness, and racing thoughts after taking high doses of B vitamins.

We also explore the powerful impact of diet on both brain and gut health, revealing how certain foods and synthetic supplements could be exacerbating underlying genetic issues. Plus, we discuss the importance of listening to your body's signals and how genetic testing can provide actionable insights to improve your health. This is a must-listen for anyone looking to optimize their well-being through a deeper understanding of their genetic makeup.

Highlights:

• Listening to body signals
• Genetics vs. Epigenetics
• Addressing leaky gut and health
• Gut health’s role in overall wellness
• Actionable insights from genetic testing
• Nutritional strategies for genetic issues
• Self-checks for body symptoms
• MTHFR prevalence and symptoms
• Methylation’s role in DNA repair
• Potential issues with synthetic folic acid
• Diet affects brain and gut health
• ADHD diagnoses may relate to diet
• Foody dyes exacerbate behavioral issues
• Focus in nutrition and root causes

Intro:

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Ashley James (0:00:41.012)

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 519.

I am so excited for today's guest. We get to dive into such an interesting topic today with Dr. Dr. Laurie Marti. Welcome to the show,

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:01:00.283)

Thank you.

Ashley James (0:01:02.689)

So we have a mutual friend, and that's how I discovered you, an amazing woman near and dear to my heart. Jessica does mental health counseling, but she looks at the body as a whole, very holistic mental health counseling, helping her clients to overcome addiction around anything you're addicted to. A lot of substance abuse, though. People who want to overcome substance abuse and alcohol come to her, but what I love is that she looks at the body as a whole and helps her clients as a whole, and that's, I'm sure, why she finds this topic so fascinating and why she told me that I really needed to interview you. Because, although you come from a traditional medical doctor, allopathic background, you discovered that holistic medicine, functional holistic medicine, there's this whole world, amazing world of science-based ways of doing things that isn't just waiting for someone to get sick and giving them a drug, and I love that.

I love it when MDs they see the light and they're like, wait a second. This system is incomplete without seeing this whole other side of things. I definitely want to dive into all the fun stuff we're going to talk about today, but first I want to know can you tell us, was there an aha moment as a medical doctor when you went, wait a second, have I been lied to? Was I lied to my entire time in university? Why is this whole other piece missing? Did you have an aha moment?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:02:41.395)

I think I've had a few of them. There's never just one. So I graduated in a family practice and started doing that for my first few years of my career. I was actually home with my first child and on maternity leave.

I don't even know if I'd been practicing for three years at that time. I just said, I almost don't want to go back, but I have all this student loan debt, so I know I have to go back, but I'm not really happy in what I'm doing. One of the things that really bothered me was just within the medical practice that I had three partners and I was obviously the new young partner.

I always got the most difficult patients because that's where they end up going, is to the new person in the practice. I would order a lot of blood work on them because I'm like, I don't know how to help you if I don't know what's really going on with you. I would actually get chastised by my partners by ordering so many tests. How am I supposed to figure out what's going on with them?

Well, fast forward to me on maternity leave, and there was a company that was looking for a practitioner that wanted to specialize in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and it was this moment where I was like, wow, that's an interest I've had since my residency, because my residency senior project was on a fibromyalgia patient.

During that time off, I interviewed with them and during that process, they introduced me to working with more holistic therapy because they had found that treating patients with fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition, really was amenable to a more holistic approach. I had never been introduced to any of that. it just opened up this whole new world to me. Long story short, I ended up quitting my practice in family medicine and working for that for a couple of years, and then, just wanted to go out on my own and start my own practice and it really expounded from there because I didn't want to be restricted to just working with those types of patients. I had known about naturopathic doctors but I didn't really understand what they did and so it was just by being able to incorporate all of that into the allopathic realm and having this all encompassing view of every patient was just an amazing experience. so I opened up my own practice, it was 2007, and I have not looked back. I've just learned more and more as I've gone along.

Ashley James (0:06:07.085)

Oh, 16 years. So you've been diving into the holistic space. How does an MD learn all the holistic stuff? Obviously you do your own reading, but do you go through functional medicine? Do you take those courses or do you pick the brains of naturopaths? How do you get this training? For those who are listening who are medical doctors I just want to know more. I want to dive deeper. I've interviewed so many MDs who've become holistic but the medical doctor training is designed to make you see people through the lens of medicine of reductionism. So you're looking to reduce people into their parts, that's part of MD medicine. Being a diagnostician, MDs are amazing. The problem is then the tools they're given are like, here's all these drugs. So it's just an incomplete view of the body. So many MDs that have come on my show said that they thought their education was complete because of the way their education has been presented to them and how much money and time they had to invest in their education, that what they had been taught was the most important aspects. Everything else was kind of just secondary. That functional stuff over there is not as important or poo-pooed. If you graduated from Harvard, I had interviewed a woman graduated from Harvard Medical. She said they made us believe that we were taught the most important things. So we are trained to poo-poo everything else. Then, MD drug based medicine had no answers for her when she fell ill and she had to turn to holistic medicine, which then gave her life back. It was like being pulled out of the matrix. She had this massive wake up and she's like, oh my gosh, there's this whole other aspect. So in realizing as an MD being pulled out of the MD matrix and realizing there's this whole other world you want to plug into, unless you went back to college and got a naturopathic degree. How do you navigate in the world to piece together all the information you need so that you can really help clients on a holistic level? So how do you do that?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:08:43.375)

That's a great question. There's a whole industry built around that now, one of them is called A4M. It's basically a regenerative medical group, which they have members, because it's a membership organization. But they actually put on seminars where you pay a fee and you just go and you do classes from experts in different areas of different fields and you can learn as much as you want. I did that at the beginning because I had obviously so much to learn. but I tended to focus on hormonal therapy.

You can tailor your practice to what interests you. I think I always had an interest in hormonal medicine, and then obviously these chronic conditions where they were very underserved in the allopathic community. I really felt like there was something lacking for patients that had been diagnosed with these conditions that were considered when nothing else was found to be wrong with them, it had to be in their head, it had to be psychological, and that probably bothered me the most.

Yes, I just spent a lot of hours doing formal training. You can get advanced degrees in that, but it really isn't necessary because it's really just about the knowledge. It's not like you absolutely have to have those certificates on your wall. You just have to have an interest in it and you have to put the time in to learn it because that's the most important aspect is understanding that there's different roads in any field and how you get there is you can make that your own and so you just need the background information.

But yes, it's good to know that there's this growing interest in MDs learning this other side of medicine. I was surrounded by plenty of other MDs who were in my similar space. So it's a lot different than it was back in 2007. This is definitely a growing area. I think the more that we have pandemics and things like that, you're just going to see this grow more and more.

For example, long COVID, it's almost chronic fatigue syndrome that I've been dealing with for years. But when you have these things come to the forefront in allopathic medicine, it's nice having that background because you realize that it's the same underlying processes are there. so you can take that knowledge that you've learned, even though it's something new that you might be exposed to, all that baseline information is there.

Ashley James (0:11:57.856)

What's really interesting is part of this movement was ignited by Dr. Oz. I think that's so funny, like looking back, cause I can think back to like Oprah and how she would bring things to the table to discuss like menopause. Before she had that first episode talking about menopause as she was going through it herself, you didn't talk about it. It was a hidden backdoor conversation with your doctor. It was almost shameful to bring up and she brought it into the light and brought Dr. Oz on. Then he had his own show. As they explored, just tip of the iceberg conversations about things that were outside of the allopathic realm, little holistic nuggets here and there.

Their patients would go to their doctors saying, oh, I want you to run this test, I want you to look for this. The doctors didn't have any training in that. In America you can choose your doctors, you can shop for your doctor. In socialized medicine, it's a little harder, but here you can go shop for your doctor and so you can fire your doctor. If they don't have the extra training, you can fire them and go get a new one. So all of a sudden there was this need for medical doctors to go get additional training. Go get some functional medicine training. Start to understand what's going on because it's now in the mainstream. It was now being talked about. So I just loved watching that movement take off. We still have a long way to go. I'd like to see functional medicine be taught in medical school, but then that would be helping the patient get so healthy where they would need drugs and that would cut the profits of big pharma.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:13:48.363)

Yes, there is definitely a strong push with the pharmaceutical industry and training. So yes, I don't think that's something that's going to be introduced anytime soon.

Ashley James (0:14:02.170)

Which is a telltale sign that we need to think critically when we choose the companies we buy food from, the companies we buy medicine from, the companies we buy supplements from, and the doctors we choose to see.

We need to not just blindly trust authority. We can't walk around in fear either. We need to take a step back and make sure that we're choosing the people who have the best training and also the companies who have our best interests at heart and not just profits. So I love that allopathic drug-based emergency medicine is available for us to save our lives should we need it, God forbid. It's like taking your car to a plumber. If you take a chronic disease to an MD who only has training in drug-based medicine because they don’t have the training to see how we can help the body heal itself.

So that's my soap box. I say it every day, but you live it every day as an allopathically trained MD who now specializes in functional medicine, which is so exciting.

So let's talk more about the work you do. You started out, like you talked about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and , there's like Lyme disease and that whole rigmarole of where you say we've been underserved. So true.

Then of course, the hormones, but it comes down to if we chunk down and we look at cellular health and we look at brain health, there's stuff going on. We look at liver health, there's genetics and epigenetics.

When you look at all of these different syndromes and the diagnoses and you look at the body and how the body's functioning, what's going on that's disrupting the function of the body so it presents these symptoms?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:15:57.854)

Well, that's a big question because there are so many things that can cause dysfunction in the body and it's not always really clear from the initial assessment of an individual. But that's where my biggest mantra is, each person is an individual and what makes us unique is our DNA.

So at the very core of us, we have a genetic makeup that gives us strengths and weaknesses. then from that, we have our life experiences and our exposures, whether that be toxic exposures. I think most of us would agree that probably in the last few decades, we've been exposed to more toxins than ever before in the things that we eat and the things that we breathe.

Thank goodness more and more people are starting to read labels and starting to think critically about the things they put in their body. But our DNA puts us at that part of us that we don't know what our weaknesses and strengths are. So that's really where it begins.

Then based upon your exposures in life, stresses, the things that just happen because of life, as we get older we become less resilient. So I think as you go through your decades of life there are different things that become apparent as problematic. Whether that be hormonal things or pain or fatigue, these things can happen at any age. But then obviously as we get older, then there's these different facets of just our life with our hormone changes and things like that make us more vulnerable to the deficits that we may have that we don't even know about.

Health is a journey. We don't really think about our health until it's not working. Then, we try to ask someone to help us figure it out. I think that sets a person into looking if they are satisfied with the answers that they have or do they feel like they have more questions. That's when people will seek out a more thorough investigation. I think that more and more people are becoming aware that there's other practitioners out there that can help figure out what's going to give them their healthiest experience. I think it's just an all encompassing world, when you think about what happens in our life in terms of what we consider good health and bad health and disease and pathology.

I think people have to get to a point where they feel like they need to ask for help. I think that that's really the start is when do you start asking help or asking those questions?

Ashley James (0:19:31.531)

Yes. That's such a good point, because, what popped into my mind is my mom who she was like the epitome of health to me. She worked out seven days a week. She took her supplements. She was meticulous with her diet. She'd cheat once in a while. Like she'd eat red jujubes and she knew red dye wasn't good for her, but it wasn't like she overdid it anyway. She'd have like three red jujubes and that was her little guilty pleasure. She had some alcohol, like one or two servings, a few times a week kind of thing. So she had a little guilty pleasure, but she felt like she made up for it by how strict she was with her diet. Like she followed the diet plan that her naturopath gave her just meticulously and had the discipline to exercise but she ignored these little symptoms that came up. She ignored this whole little digestive feeling here, a little tired there, a little kind of funny feeling near her liver, she chalked it up to the fact that she had moved to Naples, Florida. They'd gone through the stress of moving. She was acclimating to a new climate, eating different food, meeting, making new friends, doing different activities. She just kind of pushed it off to the side until she was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. A few months later she died. She ignored the symptoms because she was healthier than most. So those symptoms weren't maybe if she was not healthy, maybe she was eating junk food every day and just really didn't take care of herself. She would have noticed sooner but she ignored those symptoms. So, at what point are you a hypochondriac? At what point are you making a smart move by getting checked out because you feel the symptoms? So for her, it wasn't a big deal until all of a sudden it was.

My dad, on the other hand, largely ignored major red flags for heart disease and died suddenly of heart failure. So, that’s blatant. I'm going to ignore major, major red flags. But then sometimes the body is speaking in whispers. So at what point do you go what? This isn't optimal health. I should probably look into how I could optimize this. So is it that I'm a little tired in the morning? Is it a little bit of brain fog? Is it like I notice I can't do as well in the gym?

I had a friend, we were part of a coaching program. He was an amazing coach. He‘s been a chronic smoker his whole life. Then he quit and did Iron Man's and his coach noticed that his times on his running were getting worse. That’s the only symptom he had of lung cancer. He ended up overcoming lung cancer. Lived for many, many years. Died very, very elderly. I don't remember if he was in his eighties. He lived a full life. That was his only symptom. So luckily he caught it early enough.

When do we listen and go, I want to optimize that. On the other hand, we've been told our whole life, oh, you have that because you're a woman, you have that because your mom had that, you had that because you're in your 40s or 50s or 60s, you have that because you're black or you're white or what. We're just told these ridiculous things, these lies by our doctor that, oh, you're fat because your family was fat, or you have diabetes because your family has diabetes, or you have glaucoma just because that's what happens when you're 70. Like they're blatant lies.

This is why, again, I kind of get on my soapbox with MDs that tell their patients, you're just going to have to be sick because this is how it is. It's not true at all. Your genetics don't dictate your future. They help educate us on where it might go but it has to accompany your lifestyle.

So we look at the patient who has been told there’s a certain way their whole life, or maybe they just believe it because their mom or their grandma said, this is just how it is. Even the mainstream media, everyone, all women have period cramps, like these lies. If you were in absolute perfect health, you would notice no difference. You would just all of a sudden be like, oh, I got my period today. There would be no PMS. PMS is a sign that things are out of balance and we should be listening. So I'd love for you to share, what symptoms do you want people to listen to and take seriously and know that they can optimize those at any age?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:24:23.603)

Well, I think that is absolutely critical. Unfortunately, the exposures that we have in our medical community is that you don't really ask those questions. So when you're a teenager, you may go in for a sports physical. You're not really encouraged to expound on anything. It's a form you check off. What child is going to admit anything's wrong. That's where we have to change the paradigm, even if it's only not going to the doctor, even if it's among the population, our health is something that should be a topic of conversation.

I think it's never too early to say, you know maybe I should do a comprehensive stool test to figure out how my digestion is because who doesn't have a bloated belly every now and then, or react in some funky way to something they ate, and I'm not talking about food poisoning, I'm just talking about, gosh, that did not agree with me, and it's something I've eaten before. Just having that awareness that if something happens that is not a completely random event, but it keeps happening. That's when you have to do something about it.

For example, normally most of my patients are adults, but I will end up seeing their teenagers or their children only because maybe they've kind of had some random things happen and maybe it's not right. Most of the time we blow off young people's symptoms because they're young and they should be healthy. Come to find out a lot of things that teenagers suffer with acne, just food sensitivities, those things are not normal. However, we've begun to normalize that. The problem is that when you start normalizing those kinds of symptoms or signs, things that you see and experience, that's when you have to start saying, this is not normal. Maybe there is something I should look deeper into.

So it doesn't have to be I'm passing out or I have some real severe symptoms or something like that. It can be just what we consider normal everyday teenager issues or things in our life that we just think are normal for our age. If you just have something that is just happening over and over, maybe don't just consider it normal. Maybe it is something underneath.

I've done testing on over a thousand patients and I can tell you that nobody's normal. Nobody has completely normal tests. I've checked my own tests and they're not normal. So, it's all in how you just take that next step and say, I'm not going to accept this is the way that I exist. If I can improve upon anything, maybe it gives me a longer life or maybe I'll have more energy or so it's just about not normalizing everything and having those conversations with your friends and family and your connections.

Ashley James (0:28:15.421)

One of my naturopathic mentors told me about his favorite movie of all time, King of Hearts, 1966, in which during the war, this whole town is emptied out and the psychiatric patients in this asylum escape and they flee down into the town and they take over the town. All the people are, for a lack of a better term, crazy. They're having a lot of fun. They takeover the bakery, the restaurant, the inn and everything.

Then a soldier comes in and can you imagine you walk in and everyone feels as if they're normal because they're all there, but they're acting as if they've taken on these roles. He walks into this world thinking that they're all townspeople. He described the reason why this is favorite movie, because he goes, this is what it's like to be a patient in the MD medical system.

Everyone's in agreement. They're all crazy and they're all in agreement with each other. So you have to get like we were the outsider coming into this world and we've been told this is just how it is like acting and children are normal. It's not, it is not. First of all, we got to look at blood sugar. We've got to look at the gut biome. We got this list of things we got to look at, like food sensitivities but go even beyond why is there a food sensitivity? What's going on? Is there a leaky gut? Like go deeper. So we have taken a population, got them incredibly sick and then said, because so many people have sickness, it's normal. The very first step in healing is to shift our mindset and pull ourselves out of the matrix of the brainwashed way we've been taught to think.

We have absolutely been taught to think this way. I hate acting like a conspiracy person with my tin foil hat, but I'm making tinfoil hats for everyone. So passing them out right now. When you look at the history of the modern medical system, it was completely 100% orchestrated and influenced those who sold pharmaceuticals at the time over 100 years ago. It has since been not a days gone by that the pharmaceutical industry has not had control over the education of medical doctors and the number one sponsor of all media are the pharmaceutical industry which is petroleum-based. That's a whole fun rabbit hole to go down of true history not a perceived conspiracy, but a real conspiracy. A real conspiracy is when someone or a group of people get together to conspire to do illicit things or to do things that aren't ethical or aren't right. This is absolutely not right because they control the media that you've been bringing into your brain since you were born. Also your parents. But your grandparents or great grandparents. They were before this and they might have had a garden with herbs. They had animals. They did a regular deworming of the animals and then they took the same herbs as well. This is something that's been lost, but it was 100 years ago plus we had a lot of things that we knew to do. Now we also did a lot of really weird stuff, like eat things with lead in it. Paint our body with arsenic or whatever, we had weird things we had. So at least we've gotten rid of the not so healthy things. But if we go back, we see that our ancestors incorporated nature into their medicine.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:32:11.885)

Well, there was less of a dependence on a system. Again, there's probably multiple theories on what's behind it, but the idea is that we become more inclined to be part of this dependency of people taking care of us. Like we don't take care of ourselves anymore.

But I think that's starting to change. See, I really do feel there are more and more people asking questions, which is where it starts. It starts by being inquisitive because I think we have been told to obey and don't ask questions and just do what you're told but I think people are starting to say, we can follow the rules, but maybe we ask questions along the way. I think it goes beyond even health in that realm but it's about people just using these really big brains that we have and not accepting status quo's because as we become a society that's sicker, we dig ourselves into deeper holes.

I think people are finally starting to wake up and say, maybe there is an alternative way, maybe that we start being more self-sustaining, that we don't ask for help, or depend on organizations to help us. Use those resources when you need them, but also realize that we have a responsibility to ourselves and our families to make sure that we're in the best health possible. In doing that, it does require some work. It requires you to do some research to think outside the box because you're not going to get that if you just go to your doctor's office, you're not going to get that. So it's about people having a different mindset and saying, I'm just going to start asking different people different questions and maybe I start learning some new things and some ways that I can help myself and meet the right practitioners that are going to help me in this journey of empowering myself. That process is really powerful. It really teaches you not only how to take care of yourself better, but how to take care of others better and just a community spirit in that, because I think our health is about community too. We need to heal ourselves, but in the process of just eating better and sourcing out better foods and things like that, we are making those connections that can all help us be healthier.

Ashley James (0:35:22.225)

It does matter the environment because I've had clients before where they're the only one eating healthy and everyone else is going to Sonic's or going to Starbucks and Sonic's and Jack in the Box and McDonald's and they're all kind of laughing at her wanting to go to bed early and get up early to go for her walks or make her smoothies and all the changes she's making versus the clients have had where the whole family is doing it with her or 100% on board or their husband's like, yes, make me a smoothie too.

It’s so much easier when the people around you are on the journey with you, or at least supportive of your journey and not questioning you or putting you down. I can't tell you how many clients have had with that choose to cut out dairy. Then someone in the family is like, you need dairy and you're going to hurt yourself if you don't. They get really indignant and angry at them because they think that they're going to die if they don't eat dairy. Then they literally, on the same day, go through the drive through and eat fried food. That's okay, but how dare you not drink the mammalian excretions of another animal?

We need to respect and honor our friends and family when they're trying to make health choices. But what I explained to my clients is that when people get upset, especially those who are close to you, when they get upset about your changing, it's just holding a mirror up to themselves and they don't want to change.

People with addiction also get very angry because they don't want to give up their sugar and alcohol or whatever they're addicted to. So, if you choose to give those things up, if they don't want to make changes, they get angry at you for making changes because they don't want to feel threatened.

It's really interesting to make a health change and declare it to your friends and family and then just watch and see who's supportive and then who isn't and I get that it's their stuff, but we have to kind of set ourselves up and make sure we have our healthy boundaries in place because it's really interesting who comes out of the woodwork to sabotage us. It's their stuff, but still we need to protect ourselves.

Earlier, you talked about how nutrient deficiency and toxic exposures are largely on the rise, that's something we've seen in the last 40 years create chronic illness. Then there's this whole aspect of genetics, which you love to get into. I'm really, really interested to talk about MTHFR, which is just one of the many genetic things that we could talk about, but I'd love for you to explain, from your standpoint as a physician working with a patient or client, what is the difference between someone's genetics and someone's epigenetics when it comes to helping them support their body's ability to heal itself and create optimal health.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:38:30.620)

The very first thing I do with any person that first comes to see me is I get an assessment of their environment because you can find out all you want about their genetics. But if their environment is in a negative space you will find that their genetics aren't even if they have strong points they are not necessarily going to work for their benefit. So that concept of epigenetics is that you have certain genes and gene mutations that we're born with, but these exposures, and either good or bad, will affect the expression of those genes.

So that's what's really amazing about this whole idea is that people have for so long said, well I have this genetic problem or that's this genetic predisposition. So I guess I'm going to die of this or, or it's my parents had this and now I'm getting it. So, there's nothing I can really do to change it. Well, we've realized that's not the case, that there are factors that can improve upon these weak areas in our genetics and we can make them function better. In that process, people learn that they aren't subject to the outcomes that gene or that group of genes might cause for them disease-wise, if they pay attention and they take care of their nutrition in a way that optimizes those. So the way that a lot of these genes work is even if you have a mutation in an enzyme, you can take nutritional cofactors that can improve upon the function of that enzyme. if you do that, then you reduce the risk of the potential outcomes of that mutation.

So you had mentioned MTHFR, that's actually the gene that got me interested in genetics because I had read this research paper about fibromyalgia and how this chronic pain condition was affected by this gene, which I know I had heard about in medical school, but it was nothing that was a big topic of discussion. So it was something that I was familiar with, but didn't really know anything about and that definitely led me down the rabbit hole of just understanding that particular gene but then of course, there's a whole host of others that can affect it. so, just in this process of learning how we can understand what our genetic makeup is, but we can improve upon it based upon different factors that we can support. I think there's just a huge educational piece in this because people are learning this stuff or hearing about it for the first time. It's pretty science-oriented, you can really get into the weeds in it. Part of my job is to bring it down to a level that I think people can utilize that information and apply it in their own lives, take that information and do something positive with it.

Then,what I do is I support that with blood work and looking to see, to show people that they're making a difference. The choices that they're making both with their lifestyle and with their choices in what they eat and the supplements that they take, they can see in black and white how these things are changing within their body from their blood work and that really encourages people.

Ashley James (0:42:40.355)

Can you give us some examples?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:42:42.361)

Are you talking about a specific blood test?

Ashley James (0:42:45.697)

When you've worked with a specific client, obviously don't mention their name, you saw these genetic things and you saw how their gene expressions were expressing epigenetically, and then you supported them with the right cofactors and then they themselves felt results and you could also see those results on labs and also in their demeanor.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:43:13.535)

Yes, so I wouldn't even say a specific one, but I would say, in general, I will see patients that don't sleep very well, or maybe they have mood issues, depression or anxiety. I will identify that they have certain gene mutations like MTHFR.

One of the things that we do is you want to promote the use of certain vitamins that are specific for supporting those enzymes. What people start seeing is that, wow, I'm sleeping better. Then there are biomarkers, there's blood markers that you can check that actually start out abnormal when they haven't taken those supplements. Then they'll see over the course of three to six to nine months that those numbers are coming down. They're also seeing that maybe not as anxious, they're getting more energy, just their mood seems more stable. A lot of people do these genetic tests now. We talked to several people who have done them, and they'll find out they have a gene mutation, and there's plenty of information on the internet out there about them. Oh, take these B vitamins because they're going to help you. What happens is, they don't know the dosing or, they haven't really been instructed on how to take those things. So they end up being very anxious and this was the worst thing I ever did was take these B vitamins and I was supposed to take them because I have this gene mutation.

Well, obviously, these gene enzymes do not exist in a bubble, theere's other genes that affect, for example, MTHFR. So it's important to understand the supportive genes in that particular realm because some people, if they start taking B vitamins in a very high quantity, and I mean, some of the dosages out there are quite high, and all of a sudden they aren't just really, really anxious. That's usually the biggest thing. They're not getting any sleep and their mind is racing. It's just because they don't know that there's other genes that are malfunctioning, that you've revved up a system that hasn't been very active, and now you've over activated it. So there is a process with this where you don't want to just go at this without guidance. It's very, very important to understand how these genes influence each other and that you have to really personalize it. That's what I do is I work with people to personalize their supplements, their treatments so that they don't make those mistakes of feeling their mental health has really taken a nosedive because they started taking vitamins. So this is the educational piece that I was talking about because, like I said, there's lots of testing that people can do without a doctor ordering it for them. But it's important to know the ramifications of taking certain treatments and supplements when you have these gene mutations.

Ashley James (0:46:58.058)

I have MTHFR. I know there's different ones that I don't remember the name of the one I have but it's interesting because I have had liver problems that I have figured out certain things exacerbate my liver and certain things really, really help. When I take high levels of B vitamins, and this happens to my husband too, we both get very irritable and argumentative. So we typically dole out our supplements and take them together. This was years ago, we were hitting the upper limits of B vitamin dosages and the days that we did we’re at each other, we’ll playfully bicker in a very loving way, but we were just really irritable. I was, I don't like how I feel. I feel uncomfortable and irritable. When I take very, very high doses of B vitamins, which I don't anymore. Back then they weren't methylated. That makes a big difference for me also.

You can't just go to Trader Joe's and buy B vitamins or whatever. You can't just buy whatever's off the shelf. It's not going to be the highest quality, the most bio available. It's not going to be in the right ratios and it's definitely not going to be methylated. So there's just so many things.

I remember way back in the day, 15 years ago, going to Trader Joe's and buying all my supplements because I believed in vitamins. I thought, oh, this is good for me. It did not have a negative effect. So people will often try to save money. They'll hunt around like, oh, these vitamins over here at Walmart are cheaper. I'm like, well, you're actually wasting money and not only are you wasting money, there's like a net negative because now they're actually hurting you. Whereas I really do believe in quality supplements and diet and looking at everything as a whole. But when we go to take our supplements, we really have to make sure. I think even less is more.

Start at a slow, low dose and slowly work your way up and find where you feel best because I did that and I was, wow, my dose was like a hundred pound dose, instead of, doing like the full body weight dose and some people, they just excel, or even a child's dose, I know a woman who does like doses almost the amount that an infant would be given and she can't do anymore and she's like, I feel amazing when I just do this much. This is what her body needs. Just this little extra booster of the cofactors.

This is why when it comes to buying your supplements, I highly recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com getting a free consultation with one of our true health coaches because the supplements that we use in our protocols are all methylated and they’re grouped together in complexes in the way that all the ratios are in balance and they’re all designed to support your liver, support your detox pathways, and support optimal health and nutrition for every single cell and because they’re dosed by body weight you can begin slow and slowly increase and increase until you find the perfect dose for you and the coach that you are assigned to will show you how to do that will show you how to take the supplements that are best for you and that support your body’s ability to heal itself and support your liver to detoxify and your methylation pathways. It is a huge game changer. It’s life-changing. So go to takeyoursupplements.com. Sign up for the free consultation and give it a try. They will also show you how to get free shipping. They will show you how to fit it within your budget if you have a budget. For example, if you are in such a tight space with your money that you’ve less than $50, there is a plant derived, trace mineral supplement, it’s a liquid, it’s about $25 then there’s tax and shipping on that and it is life-changing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people just on that one trace mineral supplement. They see a huge shift in their health because we are so depleted in minerals. Of course if you can afford more they have an amazing complex that is all vitamins and trace minerals, and extract nutrients from plants and antioxidants, and it’s all methylated, all the minerals are plant derived so plants have already digested the minerals so the body can absorb them. I haven’t found supplements like in any other company. I’ve been working with them for over 12 years, with my clients and with my family and myself getting great results. They also have a money back guarantee so there’s nothing to lose. There’s everything to gain. Go to takeyoursupplements.com.

I want the listeners to have a strong grasp on this concept of epigenetics, because with genetics, we all know you're born with your eye color. That's it. We can't change your eye color. You have freckles, she doesn’t have freckles. This is what we're born with. That's genetics that's baked into the cake.

And then there's this epigenetics, which is like super fascinating and this world where things can be turned on and off. For example, exposures to toxins can negatively impact our epigenetic expressions to turn on cancer. We don't want that. Plastics, there's so many environmental things that can turn on the genetic expressions for several generations.

The mouse studies found five generations after BPA exposure took five generations to correct itself and the mice that were exposed to it even though they ate the same food, became obese. These are called obesogens. That's so frustrating because so many people are walking around like, I'm doing the best I can. I'm eating super well. Why am I struggling? Well, do you eat out of plastic? Let's start with looking at the parabens and the best phenol A and all that, all those obesogens, the cumulative exposure. So clean up, clean up the toxicity in your life, in your kitchen, in your cupboards, even drinking out of Starbucks cups, the little plastic thing on top, just because it says BPA free doesn't mean the chemicals are not in it. It just means one type of chemical. There's still like nine others that could be in there? It leeches into our food, especially when the food or beverage is hot. So you have these negative epigenetic expressions we can turn on. Then you have these wonderful, healthy gene expressions we can turn on by the right nutrition and bringing down toxicity. Can you educate us about that for those who this is such a new concept for?

Dr. Laurie Marti (54:38.754)

I think we're starting to really understand how our offspring is an adaptive process. We can see that just if you look at human height and different things like that, there's different aspects that things will change over generations depending on your exposure. So it's not that we haven't seen that in action. People could point to different things within cultures where things just get passed down. So there's this idea that we have this really amazing adaptive response in our bodies. For example, there might be a time when we won't be able to eat gluten anymore.

So this was really not anything up to probably 30 years ago. I mean, I grew up eating gluten. It wasn't a problem, but my own kids have problems with gluten. You look at these different things, whether it be the chemicals in the environment, herbicides, pesticides, and you look and it's like,

I don't think I gave them a bad gene, but just that whole idea that they may pass on to their own offspring the inability to eat gluten. It's not anything that I would have given them. So there is this idea that things in our environment can change our genes good or bad, so that our offspring then take on that gene expression. So that's kind of the idea of what some people call biohacking or where you say, okay, I've identified these genes and if I support them in an optimal way, maybe my offspring and generations to follow, it will not be as much of a problem. But the other aspect to this is that we have seen certain genes will adapt because of certain environmental factors. We've seen that in sickle cell disease the people that have sickle cell are more resilient to malaria. For example, so we know that those type of things can also be passed on based on those environmental exposures but the idea that we now, because the genome has been mapped, and that we can identify these different genes, if we intervene on a certain level, well, we may change the dynamics of health to come. So what we do now, the choices that we make now, the different advances that we can make in our health now, and like you said, getting rid of fragrances and things that so many of the chemicals that actually, like you said turn off some of these genes. If we can eliminate some of those things in our lives that actually promote those deleterious effects on our genes, then maybe in the future, we have a much healthier population.

Ashley James (0:57:50.695)

So are you saying that continuous exposures to certain things over generations, the body adapts as a theory? Did the bodies adapt based on their malaria exposure by developing sickle cell? Is that a theory?

Amazing. In the last 100 years, and this is even before genetically modified food, in the last 100 years, they changed wheat and modified it the way they did the agriculture. The way they harvested it and pollinated and cross-pollinated. They grew wheat that contained more and more and more gluten. So food in the last just three to four generations has a tremendous, measurably huge amount more gluten. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something crazy. It was some crazy number that it has increased.

We've always eaten ancient grains. We've always had some very small amount of gluten in our diet, but now it's this very strong exposure, just like we've always had arsenic. Arsenic's been in our food, but in very, very trace amounts. If you concentrate it, it will kill you. if you concentrate it, but not to the point where it kills you, it will poison you and it will be heavy metal poisoning. You can live with it your whole life, live a shorter life, be chronically sick, and it is not be great. So at some point, gluten, it tipped the scales, and it's a net negative. So small, tiny amounts for thousands of years was fine. Then they concentrated the amount of gluten that the plant makes.

Now, it's interesting, in certain European countries, they eat the bread just fine. They come to the States, they eat the bread, they get incredibly sick. That's because the amount of gluten changes, some people can concentrate gluten, like vegetarians or vegans and in China, they'll take gluten and make a meat-like substance out of it. So some people eat just like concentrated gluten and they're fine. Whereas other people, like your children, like my whole family, we don't respond well to it. So are you saying that over time, because of the exposure, our epigenetics will adapt so that we can't eat it anymore?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:00:30.722)

Yes, I believe that's the case. Right now we see it really prominent in young people. I'm 51, so I kind of miss that because I think some of the major herbicides and things like that, the genetically modified stuff really, I think I missed some of that in my youth. My kids generation, they're being exposed to it on every level of different foods, even well-made foods, not just processed foods. I think what's happening is, yes, we were going to end up having their offspring might not be able to eat any form of gluten. I think that that's something that is starting to happen, but which is a real tragedy because wheat has been around for millennia and it's actually full of really healthy B vitamins. It's a real tragedy that we're getting to a point where we're allergic to wheat because of the gluten content. But what's really interesting is you can find forms of wheat that are non-hybridized like the ancient forms of wheat. But people who are gluten sensitive can't even have those. Which yes, so we've gotten to the point where even if they eat the stuff that's been around for millennia, they can't eat it anymore because their gut has no ability to process it. even if you take digestive enzymes, it still doesn't fix it because the inflammatory process has already set in.

Ashley James (1:02:24.953)

Oh man, I interviewed a guy, Dr. John Doulliard, and he wrote a book called Eat Wheat. when I saw that, I was, oh no, I'm doing an interview with a guy who's selling everyone to eat wheat. I was, okay, let me dig a little deeper. I'm not going to like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It turned out it was brilliant. It was a brilliant title. This was back in Episode 505, this whole book actually is not just go eat wheat and that's the healthy thing for you. He's saying to use food almost like a diagnostic tool. There's ways to measure your health and then go eat wheat, see how you feel. Like cut wheat out for 30 days or 60 days and then eat some, for example but using food to measure your health. If you eat wheat for that day after cutting it out for a while and you feel horrible, you don't sleep well or you're inflamed or your joints are achy, it doesn't have to be digestive, it could be brain fog, then we need to look deeper because there's more stuff going on. But I just thought that it was really interesting that we could use certain foods as a way of measuring our own health and lack thereof and where we can strengthen our health. So, their genetics don't change like eye color, hair color, that kind of thing that you're born with. But then there's this entire beautiful world of epigenetics, which we can influence. So that gives you a bit of power. We can influence. So, back when I was a kid, they were talking about genetics as a standpoint. Nope. Well, but heart disease might be genetic. So, you might be passed down and that's it. Your grandpa had it. You're going to have it. Your dad had it. You're going to have it. That kind of thing.

First of all, lifestyle is absolutely a hundred percent if you have a really, really healthy lifestyle, it doesn't matter what your genetics are because you can intervene. But it's good to know where the weak links are in our body and our health. Then there's epigenetics that’s something we can influence and turn on or turn off in our lifetime. That's the empowering thing. That's where we come to you and we go, okay, what can we do? So when someone comes to you and says, I don't want to feel sick anymore, do you do epigenetic testing? How does that work?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:05:01.901)

So usually what I'll do is I lay it out for people what options that they have for testing. Some people just are not comfortable doing genetic tests, and I understand that. I mean, to each their own. I usually tell them that having some information about genetics is a key aspect to what I do, because I use it like a roadmap to figure out what other testing might be most useful for that person. So I really try to assess right away what their comfort level is. Then some people just want to do everything and that's great. They like data, because data is a huge part of what I do, it's like collecting data.

There's a lot of people who understand that and they want to take advantage of that. Other people are just a little bit scared of, not necessarily what they might find, but just that maybe they shouldn't be looking in those areas and I don't know how to explain it, but everybody has their comfort level. So what I try to do is really look at their family history and from the things that their grandparents, their parents, aunts and uncles may have dealt with, that gives me a clue because there are obviously some hereditary aspects to general health. Then once I have that, then I can point them in the direction of where they may want to go. I think when people were first doing these tests, a lot of people were using the commercially available ones, the more hereditary family ancestry and things like that. Everybody has their own take on doing genetic testing. Personally, I like ones that are actionable. So it's not just enough to find out that you don't have a rare condition because most people don't have those rare conditions.

Mostly genetics to me is something that needs to be actionable. How can I use this information to better myself and better my future? Is there something that I can clean up in my life that I should clean up because of my genetics? For example, just myself, I have really high cholesterol and I figured out that I have genetics that I don't process saturated fats well. Well, I was eating a lot of dairy and cheese. So those were all things that I had to change because if I didn't, I would end up with probably type two diabetes, which is what my grandmother had and both of my grandmothers. It was something that I did not want to become my grandparents. So I was, hey, I have this information. I'm going to do something about it. So I just started working on differences in my diet. So that's where I will utilize, and I recommend genetic testing where you can understand the nutritional aspect of your genetics because I think that's the single most, the simplest way to really make a difference right away, as well as your long-term outcomes. So those are what I tend to recommend. Like I said, some people want to do it, some people don't, and if they don't, I say okay. So what we'll do is we will just do blood testing. I can do comprehensive stool testing. I love looking at the gut. I think outside of genetics. This is really interesting because even mainstream medicine is really picking up on this. I will never forget my allopathic side. I get email blasts and things like this from the big medical societies and things like that. I want to know what they're promoting and one thing that I heard about and I think it was just this week, it was a trivia question. Where is most serotonin made?

Ashley James (1:09:30.646)

I know the answer.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:09:32.782)

Yes, I bet you do. I already knew it was in the gut, but that was the answer. 90% of it is made in our gut, serotonin, and 10% is made in the brain. Yet how do we address people that have mental health? Well, we try to manipulate their neurochemistry. Shouldn't we be manipulating our gut chemistry? That's mainstream medicine is finally picking up that our gut is an area that's really, really important. So really, I would probably say I try to get 100% of my patients to collect a stool sample. I know people probably raise their eyebrows and good thing I do telemedicine because sometimes I don't see that. But it is definitely like some people are kind of go, well, that seems weird. But oh my goodness, I have learned so much through just understanding people's general health through the function of their gut. That's just something that people are really receptive to it. Once they see that, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm like that.

Obviously I'm reacting to gluten. I have a gluten antibody response. Those are things you wouldn't believe how powerful that is to get people to stop eating gluten at least temporarily at least until you can clean up the leaky gut. The fact that we have biomarkers to check for leaky gut, these were things we didn't even know we could test for. In fact, the problem is the allopathic medical community doesn't even know some of these tests exist.

Ashley James (1:11:19.121)

They don't even believe in a leaky gut. They're still going around poo-pooing it.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:11:25.193)

So the thing is, and this is just a process, the more that I think patients become aware of these things and are doing these things. Their regular doctors are going to be exposed to this, whether they like it or not, because the patients are going to say, hey, I did this test, and so I think even the patients enlighten the doctors a lot.

Even with me, I listen to my patients so much and I let them guide quite a bit of what they do. I obviously give them information, but it's a two-way street. I think that allopathic medicine has been very paternalistic, it's a one-sided thing, and you chastise the patient if they haven't been doing what they needed to be doing for the last year or when you're not happy with their blood work. That's not the right approach. The right approach is to make it a two-way street and say, hey, here's the education, here's what's going on with you, consider this like a baseline. The choices you make are going to influence. I keep patients accountable by redoing some of these tests. So that they can see, because I can only guide them. I can't be with them every day to coach them and say, you got to do this or don't do that. Give them the tools and then they're going to make much better choices about things if they just understand the education or if they have that educational piece and they understand the consequences of not doing those things or the benefits of doing the things that they should be doing.

Ashley James (1:13:08.979)

Well, they're motivated because they paid you and they went through the process of paying for these labs. Also they came to you for a reason. They're not feeling well and they want to get better. So many people are walking around not even believing they can get better. That's why I love doing my podcast because my listeners are getting on a visceral level, oh, my body can heal itself. My body was designed to constantly see homeostasis. I'm going to help it get there. Imagine we're climbing. I say there's no Mount Everest of health. I have this joke because I have overcome so many things in my past. So many illnesses in my past, and yet I'm still on a health journey and I'm never going to be done. I'm never going to reach the top and put my flag on the top of Mount Everest of health and say, I'm done. There is no getting done, but there's these peaks and valleys. There's these plateaus. When I say plateau, I mean, in a good way, You're standing there, yay, I got to this part of the mountain and you can look out and observe your new level of health and then look back down the mountain, wow I used to be down there I'm here now and then you go up the mountain a bit and all of a sudden now you dip down a bit. This is not where I want to be. I got to keep going up

So for me doing a self check, checking in with myself and listening to the symptoms of my body, listening to my body say, these are my energy levels. This is my brain function. This is my sleep. Just checking in and I keep track of my monthly cycles and anything that would accompany that, keep track of bowel movements and just anything out of the ordinary, anything, just listening to my body, just tuning in, listening. Again, not from the fear standpoint. But from the thank your body, this is the language that you speak. Now I've been trained to listen to those symptoms and help just like you have and help them guide us and for someone who has not no training in what these symptoms might mean, you want to go to someone who's been trained, but just listen to them. The best thing to do is do a mood food journal. When I say journal, I don't mean like you're writing paragraphs about what you did that day, just very quick, write down, like score your sleep, score your energy level, score your mental health. I'm feeling great today, or I'm feeling super motivated or I'm feeling miserable, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling down on myself, I have tender breasts, or I'm constipated, or I have a headache because I didn't drink enough water yesterday. Jot these little bullet points, and write down things you put in your mouth. You don't have to measure it, but just be like, today I ate strawberries and yogurt, and I had waffles, or whatever. Today I went to McDonald's and ate junk food. You write it down.

Look at it and go, wow, every day, oh, I have a headache because everyday I drink wine the night before. You can look at the obvious ones but there's some not so obvious where I figured out that I couldn't eat eggs anymore. Eggs cause heart palpitations for me. It was the weirdest thing. I ended up doing a Viome test, in which I had the CEO of Viome and one of their top scientists in a separate interview talking about how they test. They also collect stool samples. It's a home kit. So it's easy. You're not scaring my audience. My listeners are like, they'll be fine. They'll go do the stool sample, it'll be fine. It's actually not that hard to do. It's pretty simple. They make it super easy. They do over 100,000 gene expressions of your microbiome. So they're not testing your genetics. They're testing the genetics of the bacteria that live in your gut. I cannot believe what I learned. I am blown away by how cool just that test alone. I can imagine like the stool tests that you do and the looking deeper into your genetic expressions based on what you eat or what you don't eat and how that's going to shift your body and shift your genetic expressions and looking for what kind of co-factors we can support and like making sure that you don't have leaky brain. There's all kinds of cool stuff that we can look at. I love that we can take someone and help them to find what kind of diet they need. When you work with people, and you're doing the stool testing, what's the most important thing you make sure you look at? I know everyone's different. For me, I want to make sure you're drinking enough water because so many people walk around chronically dehydrated and yet everyone knows they should drink enough water, but no one drinks enough water unless you carry a water bottle and I don't mean a plastic one with you all the time, you are not fully hydrated and or make sure they get enough sleep. There are these foundations of health that the majority of people don't take seriously, but are critical to our health. Are there some major foundational things you make sure to check with everyone?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:18:25.811)

Well, I mentioned the stool test, and I think within that, leaky gut has got to be one of my favorites. If I find it, if it's abnormal, there's a whole lot that's going to be corrected if you can correct that. Because what we understand about inflammation, once inflammation is in the gut, if it's self-contained, you may have just gut symptoms.

Once that inflammation starts leaving the confines of the intestinal system, that's when you start seeing all these other things that we wouldn't even necessarily associate with our gut. So you might see skin problems, you might see like we call it brain fog, just not thinking clearly because once these inflammatory compounds start entering, crossing the blood brain barrier and start entering into our brain we start having a lot of mental cognitive issues.

Then mood issues and of course that affects sleep. Then if you start affecting sleep you start affecting cortisol and our adrenal health. So there's a cascade of things that can happen if you have a leaky gut. You could also look at like MTHFR being a foundational thing too, but there's something very dynamic about the way that our gut has this barrier function, and when that barrier function breaks down, our bodies really become out of sync, whether it be hormonally or we think that almost all chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmunity is all built upon this idea that these inflammatory compounds are leaching into the rest of our body. That's why I ask all my patients to do a stool test, a functional stool test, and like I said, one more, I can test the leaky gut function because if that's present, then that needs to be healed.

Typically, there's a protocol, with some food eliminations and different healing factors and things like that, that can help, but it's then you start assessing, okay, what are you eating that is contributing to this? What are you doing that we can modify? What can we do to start this healing process and then stop this outflow? If you can stop that process from leaching out into the rest of the body, that's going to make a huge difference on so many other areas, like I said, that may not even feel like it's a gut problem.

I've actually found skin conditions are some of my favorites to deal with because when you're talking about things that fluctuate mood and things like that, they're all happening internally. When you have something external and you start seeing it get better and that you can actually see, oh, I ate the wrong things. I started eating gluten again. There goes my acne. When things are on the outside, you pay attention to them a lot more. So again, people can be self-accountable, especially when they see those things. But yes, that leaky gut concept, I've been doing this a long time, seeing patients and working with chronic illnesses. I think the prominence of gut health and this permeability issue that we call leaky gut, that is becoming one of my go to prominent factors. If that can be fixed, a lot of other things can be fixed.

Ashley James (1:22:27.890)

So that's one of your foundation things. So water, sleep, those are for me. I could give you supplements up the wazoo. That’s one thing if you choose to go to bed at 9.30 at night and you have poor sleep, but if you choose to go to bed at one in the morning, then you've got to choose to go to bed on time. So these are foundation things. So many people just disregard it because it's like, ah, whatever, I want to stay up and Netflix and chill or whatever. I don't like drinking water. Whatever their excuse is, there's no amount of drugs or supplements or natural remedies that are going to get you to optimal health because the body doesn't function on poor sleep and dehydration.

So once we cover those foundation things, and there's a few others, definitely a few other foundation things. It’s like, I don't care if your car is a million dollars. A million dollar car or a $30,000 car, there's no gas in it, it's not going. Same with your body. So there's foundational stuff.

Then that next level is foundational, like functional testing. We got to check everyone for this because it's so prevalent. I know that they say almost 50% of the population just depending on ancestry has MTHFR to some degree. That's something that everyone really should know about themselves. We're in this day and age, we can get the testing. It makes such a huge difference. Can you explain what MTHFR is? What is this process of methylation and why should we know if we have, if our body has trouble with methylating and what that all means?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:24:19.719)

Yes, so now you even mentioned it, you've heard it's about half the population. I've even heard it might be even up to 80 percent, but again that might be epigenetics. Our genetics may actually be getting worse over time where more and more people are having mutations in this gene. But what it really is MTHFR, a gene as an enzyme is a protein and it utilizes certain nutritional cofactors to basically do this methylation function in our body, and has many different categories of what it's involved in. So it's involved in DNA repair. We can actually repair our DNA. When it doesn't repair, that's when things break down and people get cancers. So we have this ability through methylation to actually repair our DNA so that we keep things like cancer away.

So mutations and methylation would facilitate a problem in trying to do that repair. It's also important in detoxification. So through our liver, our kidneys, elsewhere in our body, and that's because one of the end products of methylation is called glutathione. Glutathione is one of our most important antioxidants in the body. If you don't have enough of that, you're going to have problems getting rid of toxins in your body. Like you said, there's a whole host of environmental toxins that we're exposed to, whether it's in the foods or the air or even like molds, for example, these are things that we utilize methylation to eliminate. We have great resilience in our bodies up to a point. The more that there's a problem with this methylation, the more that this is going to be impaired. It also is important in turning on and off other genes. So we have a checks and balances system in our body using methylation so that we don't let things go unchecked. So we have different pathways that we have to be able to control. Methylation is one of the ways we do that, it is just that whole checks and balances. It also is involved in neurotransmitter synthesis. So making things like dopamine and norepinephrine and epinephrine and serotonin. We use methylation and these compounds to make these very important neurotransmitters that run most of our cognitive processes, but also functions in controlling our blood pressure, for example. So that is all part of methylation as well. It's also an important part of our immune system. It might be from making different immune types of cells, but also with that antioxidant glutathione, that's a big part of our immunity and being able to eliminate different pathogens and things. So really, that's why it is considered a foundational part because it just involves so many of these different aspects. I didn't even mention hormones. It's not that it's involved in hormone synthesis, but it can affect it, for example, your liver's not working really well because maybe it's got a lot of toxins and you're not eliminating. Well, you also break down your estrogens there. So what we find is that if your methylation process is impaired in your liver, you will find that you'll become estrogen dominant, which is not just a problem with women. Men also have problems with estrogen dominance, especially now with plastics because they are estrogen mimickers. You get this buildup within the liver of these estrogenic compounds and you're not eliminating them properly. then that leads to a whole host of other types of problems.

Some women, it might be PMS, it might be different types of cancers, breast cancer, ovarian cancer. We know it can put strains on other hormone systems. So for example, the adrenals and the thyroid. So there's this massive interplay that happens because of what's happening at the core process that we call methylation.

Ashley James (1:29:13.384)

Methylation. Can you explain it? So I understand that there's an amino acid that we eat, methionine. Our body makes some assisting from that as well. Then our body grabs those molecules and adds that to the serotonin then it becomes melatonin. So the body is converting serotonin to melatonin. Melatonin isn’t just for sleep it actually only but 10% is used for sleep the rest is used as a cellular detoxifier while we sleep. So it’s really important not to disrupt melatonin production where sleep hygiene comes in, but also go to the gut and make sure we’re not disrupting serotonin production. So again, come back to the gut. We've got to go back to the foundations of our health, if you're not sleeping, well, could it be in the gut? Could it be in our methylation? It could just be the fact that you're staying up too late, staring at screens and drinking coffee late at night. It could be an absolute 100% lifestyle, but we could geek out on your labs and see what's going on.

So could you explain, so we understand this idea of methylation, like it grabs this molecule and attaches it, and that's methylation. Then people with MTHFR have a problem with that, so everything kind of gets backed up in the system. I want everyone to understand this more and why it's such an important thing, or one of the many things that we could have tested just so we know more about ourselves, and then we could take information from you to help us understand how we could eat and not eat and the nutrition we should take in and maybe limit to best support our ability to methylate and detoxify.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:31:13.035)

So one of the most important things that I try to teach patients, and this is if they know their MTHFR status, okay, because it depends on whether they want to know that gene or not, but once you know that you have an abnormality in that gene, it's important the type of B vitamins that you get.

So methylation is a process, it's methyl donations. So you have a methyl group that is a carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms, okay? Certain compounds become what we call methyl donors. So they donate this methyl group to another compound and it turns into something else. This process of putting on the methyl group, taking off the methyl group. That's methylation at its very bringing down that science to that level. One of the most important methyl donors, we think of, well, methylfolate. So we think of this, the folic acid in the body is a B vitamin, and that is very important for the process of this methionine, homocysteine, I think of it like a cycle in order to have a balance in this cycle you have to have the presence of methylated folate. What happens is if you have a mutation in MTHFR you can't methylate folic acid. Now if you have a diet full of green leafy vegetables you are getting natural folate. Okay you've already that natural folate is already in that methylated useful version. But say for example you eat a slice of bread and that bread is fortified with B vitamins. Now fortified grains, they put folic acid in it. Synthetic folic acid is not methylated. So if you're eating foods that are fortified and they have fortified a lot of different things now it's not just wheat, okay?

So if you eat folic acid, it is so strong that it is more strongly bound to our receptors because when we eat these things, then we absorb it and then our, it goes to find a cell and that method, that folic acid needs to enter the cell. Well, folic acid can block the receptor, because it's stronger than the natural folate. So even if you eat a lot of green leafy vegetables, it'll be blocked out if you had, so if you had a sandwich, for example, and it had folic acid in it, and even if you had lettuce on it, or some green leafy lettuce, and you had natural folate, you're going to be blocked. You're not going to absorb the natural folate. So that's why one of the paramount things that I tell people to do is get rid of folic acid and that's in a lot of supplements too. So that's why it's really important to know what supplements you're taking in because you may actually be harming yourself by blocking out by basically that folic acid, which is so strong, that synthetic version, so strong that it's going to block the absorption of the natural folate. Then you get these problems with DNA repair because you're not getting the folate. The diet and supplements are really critical once you understand what MTHFR does and why you have to be careful about putting certain compounds into your body that are going to negate the effects of other good things that you're doing.

Ashley James (1:35:10.601)

What about cobalamin versus methylcobalamin? So B12, getting a methylated version of B12 versus, I don't know, what's the difference between cobalamin? Does cobalamin exist in nature? Is that, again, just like folic acid, a synthetic thing?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:35:28.543)

Yes, cobalamin, it refers to the basic core compound chemical, and there's different forms of cobalamin. So the most common form that you would see when you pick up a B12 supplement is cyanocobalamin, which as the name, it's cyanide. It's a cyanide molecule. The small amounts probably don't help people unless you can't detoxify very well. Now, that form of cobalamin is not in its methylated version. So the idea is if you get methylated vitamins, you bypass the methylation process so that you don't then depend on these faulty genes. You're automatically already getting the form of those vitamins that your body can't do.

If you didn't have an MTHFR mutation and you took cyanocobalamin, you would be able to get methyl groups donated to that. You would be able to utilize that B12. Obviously there's an argument about the other components of that cyanocobalamin that are not good, but you could do it. There are other forms of cobalamin. There's one called hydroxylated cobalamin and there's an adenosyl cobalamin and they all have slightly different functions like the adenosylcobalamin is often used for like mitochondrial support, which is the energy producers of our cells so you can really tailor the different types of b12, but the methylated cobalamin is going to be your powerhouse B12 option because again that's already got the methyl group on it. So it's already going to be able to do its function in the body.

So that's the real core important part about the MTHFR is being able to methylate these compounds, folic acid, B12, but if you have a dysfunctional gene, you really need to take that in those already methylated versions.

Ashley James (1:37:42.394)

In my mind, I'm seeing like IKEA furniture coming into the body every day. If you're taking the cheaper supplements or the ones that aren't methylated or the synthetic ones, your body has to then do a process that has to build something. So it's like the IKEA furniture comes in and you have to, now you have to build the table. Here's the building blocks. So your body has to take a donated methyl group added to it to build it. Now it has the table. Whereas when we don't have MTHFR, it's as if we've been giving IKEA furniture, but we don't, we're missing a piece.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:38:26.218)

Yes, I mean that's a very good analogy because it's basically making it easier for your body to utilize those nutrients without having to go through all these steps in order to be able to utilize those nutrients. But that also it's a two-edged sword because if you have a lot of toxins build up in your system and all of a sudden you start taking these methylated B vitamins you’re going to start mobilizing those toxins that's why there's a start low, go slow type of thing, because people don't know how toxic they are. We're all carrying around a certain burden of toxins, some more than others, but once you start mobilizing those toxins, it can make you feel sicker. So in the early phases of this, it's really important to use lower dosages and to be gentle with it because not everybody has the best outlet of their detoxification process. That's why the gut is such an important part of this because that's a big area of waste elimination. So in order for you to eliminate toxins, you need to have a healthy gut where you have that ability to eliminate. So that's why sometimes people they want to focus on MTFHR but if you don't have a healthy gut system, you're going to mobilize these toxins and you're going to feel very, very sick if you do not have a way to eliminate, especially like people who are constipated. Oh my goodness. Those folks have a really, really rough time taking the methylated B vitamins because they're mobilizing these toxins. They become like toxic overloaded and it begins to make them feel very, very sick. So depending of course, upon each individual and how sick they are to begin with, especially if someone comes in and they're pretty sick to begin with, those are people you have to be very gentle.

Ashley James (1:40:35.545)

Yes. Exactly. Start slow. Also the testing upfront really helps because then you know how their body is going to process stuff or not process stuff. So you talked a bit about these artificial things, if we took supplements that were like lower quality and that's something that can block methylation or that it just kind of gums up the works because our body cannot methylate these things.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:41:03.567)

It will definitely block the absorption of the necessary active vitamins. You won't be able to take up these compounds. It would literally block those cellular receptors.

Ashley James (1:41:18.843)

So, this is incredible because taking folic acid, which is what all mothers are told while they're pregnant to take to prevent neuro tube defects. We all think there are two defects like where the spinal cord is sticking out of the back, god forbid, the spine is not made properly in utero, and now part of the spine is bulging. That's major. Then there's minor ones like cleft lip. Then we can go even further now because so many people having MTHFR and so many prenatals have the artificial synthetic folic acid, which what you just shared, for people with MTHFR blocks the ability to absorb and uptake and utilize folate, which we know it causes if you don't, if you have a folate deficiency, your baby is not being built properly. What we see is now a huge uprise in tongue ties and lip ties that is believed to be part of the folic acid blocking folate, we’re like, oh, no big deal, let's just go clip their tongue tie, clip their lip but that's something on the outside, but what happened on the inside? There could be other things going on the inside, just like you talked about. Skin conditions are so fun to help people heal. But if you've got rashes on the outside and scaly skin and itchy and flamed and you've got this stuff on the outside, we have skin on the inside of our body. Think about all the other parts of our body on the inside where there's the same kind of tissue. If you are on fire on the outside, imagine what's going on the inside.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:15.076)

Oh yes, if you see it externalized, there's a war going on inside, for sure.

Ashley James (1:43:21.812)

So we have this really huge juggernaut of a problem where the supplements that women are being given to prevent problems actually can contribute to causing them because a large majority of our population has MTHFR issues and then we've got on top of these synthetic supplements. Now some of my listeners I'm sure are saying, well, I'm just not going to take supplements then I can avoid this problem. Is that the answer?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:52.126)

Do not take supplements? No, because again, it depends on your diet, a big part of that, especially if you're eating fortified grains, you're going to be getting that folic acid, like you're taking supplements and you didn't even know it. That's part of the inherent problem. Fortification wasn't, we didn't always have that. That's also kind of newer and relatively. So it's important for people to realize that, yes, if you do have these deficits, depending on what your diet is. I would say most people probably don't get a healthy amount of greens in their diet. There's complications with that too. Some people get kidney stones. They can't have high oxalate foods, for example, so they do have to limit some of their green leafy vegetables.

Sometimes supplements just become a necessity because you've eliminated so many things out of your diet. For example, if we were talking about wheat. How taking wheat out of people's diet actually eliminated a lot of the B vitamins that were in it. So you have to supplement those B vitamins or if you're vegetarian, it's very hard to get adequate amounts of vitamin B12. So, the diet is very critical in determining how many supplements you need, but that's where the blood work helps. One of the biomarkers you had mentioned earlier with the methylation process is homocysteine. Homocysteine as well as glutathione, even methionine, all these things can be measured. But homocysteine ends up being a great biomarker in the blood for determining your methylation status.

Essentially with folks that have higher home assisting levels, they're going to need more supplements in the form of these methylated B vitamins. The amount of supplements that you need really needs to be tailored. That's where the testing can help determine what those needs are. So the answer is not giving up all your supplements, but the answer is doing smart supplementation. We've gotten to a point where there's no excuse for not having smart supplementation because we have so many tests that can help guide that.

Ashley James (1:46:28.365)

Also it's not just about your genetics, it can be about the genetics of your gut talking about the high oxalates, it's really interesting that you can help support your gut health and build up a healthy microbiome. There are certain microbiome bacteria that actually help our body process the greens in such a way that we don't develop kidney stones.

I'm so proud of myself because I can eat 12 pounds of spinach a day and I will never ever get kidney stones because I am one of those people that have absolutely no problem with processing it but it's not my genetics it's my gut microbiome. So the cool thing is the more you work on your gut health the more little rewards you. If you've ever played video games. It's like getting these little achievements comes up and pops up. For me, when you build your gut health, it's like you're achieving, because you populate, you grow a robust microbiome. So let's say now you only have a thousand different types of bacteria in your gut, but as you build a healthy microbiome and focus on your gut health, you could build it to 10,000, or you could have a variety that's really robust, and then you get all these little achievements, because the new healthy bacteria come in, they’ll help you digest your food, and make compounds for you. So just imagine all these little achievements popping up like, oh, you got the gut bacteria that makes it so that you're skinny.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:48:06.211)

Well, that's the beauty of the testing. It's amazing the research that they've done to make the tests so that we can identify these areas. So one of my favorite tests is called the GI Map Test. That's the functional GI evaluation stool test. They measure what they call commensal bacteria. Commensals are your keystone, your foundational bacteria. The science has gotten so good in this area where we can actually identify if you don't have enough of certain bacteria, the commensal bacteria, it will set you up for things like leaky gut. So we are really getting to the point where you can take supplements of certain targeted probiotics. It's so funny because people go and they'll buy any probiotic, acidophilus, I heard that's a good one? Well, some people have plenty of lactobacillus, which is in the acidophilus, lactobacillus family. They don't need that. But what they are lacking are some of these other lesser known commensals, which some of them provide the mucin layer which is really critical as a barrier for preventing leaky gut. There's other ones that produce short-chain fatty acids. It takes the carbohydrates, the vegetables and fruits that we eat, and these bacteria convert these compounds into making these other compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which are real key for keeping our colonicides basically are intestinal cells like tight and not leaky and creating this healthy barrier with a healthy immune system and so we've gotten to the point where we can actually target these very specific areas and it makes a profound difference in all the things down the way and the fact that we have access to that now. I think it lends itself to a whole new future of what we consider health and preventative medicine and restoring function that we've lost or that we've damaged through. So even though we can't necessarily control the toxins or, I mean, we can control to some degree, but some things we just can't. If we can make ourselves more resilient through optimization of our microbiome and taking tailored appropriate supplements, we become much less vulnerable to these things that we cannot control.

Ashley James (1:51:16.069)

I love it. We could talk all day. We could keep going and chat all day because I'm so fascinated to learn more and more and more about it. MTHFR is just the beginning. There's so many other epigenetic factors to dive into, but because it's so popular, like you said, it could be 80 percent of the population. It's definitely over 50 percent. It's so common and it’s becoming more common. We need to look at, which is so interesting how we've changed our food because when I was a kid, the cereal aisle looked a lot different than it does now. Let's just put it that way. Like we have in one generation changed our food so much. We're eating most of our food from factories. I had a doctor talking about how over 80% of a child's diet is processed food. over 80%. There's some children who don't eat any actual food. It's 100% from go-gurt and chicken nuggets and craft dinner or whatever. Children are being fed so much of this which is processed and fortified with substandard, the lowest quality, synthetic B vitamins. Then, we see MTHFR on the rise and we're wondering, gee, could it be because we have messed with nature? We've messed with our diet so severely, we made it so manmade, so artificial? In one generation, it's just pretty bizarre. Now our bodies are adapting and revolting in a sense. But this affects every area of our life. This affects the brain health, affects our gut health, affects, like you've even said, our skin. It can affect hormones, everything. We see children who are eating this way, and then they have developmental issues, and they're put on like Ritalin or something, and they're diagnosed. I have seen children who appear as if they are on a spectrum, let's say ADHD or Autism, they're on some spectrum, and then they're given very clean, healthy food, the right supplements through holistic medicine. A few months later, they are no longer displaying any of those symptoms. So my question is, was that diagnosis correct? Are they actually someone who has ADHD or is autistic? Or is it that humans will express different symptoms when their body is pushed into this toxic way?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:54:03.067)

Well, I think that was a perfect example. Because I actually talked to a lot of parents of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD. I'm like, they should probably have some genetic testing done. Because my guess is they might have an MTHFR gene mutation and they're eating processed foods, and they're eating folic acid, and that's probably creating imbalance within the neurotransmitter synthesis system.

So they're getting the erratic, just like you were talking about, irritability when you took too many B vitamins. Well, the same process can happen in kids whether it be dyes, yellow dyes or whatever, these things all promote this aberrant, imbalanced methylation process and so they end up diagnosed with these mental conditions that are actually brought on by the fact that they are being bombarded with these chemicals including what they would think of as synthetic vitamins that are okay to take but they're not in some people they're very sensitive and yes that's why I still can't believe we still put food dyes in things. There are genetics that you can analyze that actually where some people, I actually have that. I have a sensitivity to yellow food dye and ADHD diagnoses are much higher in people with yellow food dye sensitivities. So when you're eating things like a Cheeto, it's no wonder that you are not getting any real nutrition out of that, but you're bombarding yourself with food dyes as well as synthetic folic acid.

Ashley James (1:56:05.799)

Yes, and excitotoxins, it's not healthy for the brain. It's absolutely not healthy for the brain. But we feed children junk, and then put them on a drug. It's so sad. The whole mainstream says this is okay. There's known carcinogens that are acceptable on our shelves, in food, in our grocery stores, in America.

So really, we need to stop trusting. My first step is to stop trusting because as children, we watch Kellogg's, for example. Oh, Tony the Tiger or whatever. We saw Fruit Loops, we saw this cute little cartoon. We have McDonald's, oh, Ronald McDonald. Oh, look at him, I love him so much. I'm a kid. Being brought up with all these commercials. They were smart. They knew what they were doing because they had programmed children to build such a deep inherent trust of their General Mills of whatever company Nestle was.

Then you're 20 years old, walking through the aisles of your grocery store, buying your own food. you look up and you're anchored into these good emotions for Tony the tiger and General Mills and all these companies that do not have your best interests at heart. They are beholden to the shareholders and the profits and they need to buy the cheapest ingredients. Absolutely possible.

Then they need to figure out how to make it be so addictive that you'll keep eating it. It's not for our best interest, but we have been programmed to trust and love these companies. So any time you buy something from a box, it comes from a factory. We need to question what's in it. Understand reading labels. Understand what's in it. So fascinating that what's put in our food is blocking our ability to detoxify and also blocking nutrients from coming in and making us further nutrient deficient.

We could talk for hours. It's been so great having you on the show I want to make sure listeners know that they can go to your website. You do telemedicine consultations so you work with people all around the world? How does that work with you?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:58:30.902)

There are regulations within the license. I'm only licensed in the states of California and Washington. So, I have to restrict my appointments. I use Zoom or FaceTime for video when people would like video with the audio. I wish I could expand to other states. It was nice during the covid pandemic because they kind of opened up, loosened a lot of the restrictions and telemedicine really grew during that time. But unfortunately that's ended. So patients have to be physically within the state. If you were to travel to Washington State or California, I could have an appointment. So it's a really weird thing.

Ashley James (1:59:28.378)

Can someone hire you in a different capacity? Instead of a patient doctor relationship could they hire you to consult them and to just answer your questions, but not as a doctor? Not as their doctor, I should say.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:59:41.984)

Yes. I haven't really explored that. That has been something I've been looking into because obviously once you establish a doctor-patient relationship, then you really are under the confines of the licensure status. But yes, I'm exploring different things like that. Also many states actually, if you have a practitioner, even a chiropractor or anybody that is willing or able, because a lot of states are allowing even alternative practitioners to order testing and things like that, not just naturopaths, but other providers as well. So if you have a provider in a state that is not Washington or California, I can work with them, guide them, so that's an option for a lot of people in other states. If they just have a practitioner that's willing to work with me. So I wouldn't be able to order the testing per se, but I could help with the interpretation of it.

Ashley James (2:00:49.860)

Got it. So if they're working with a chiropractor or osteopath or naturopath or any kind of doctor that ordered the labs, could they bring the labs to you and you could talk to them about it or would you have to go between as their practitioner?

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:01:04.618)

I think the practitioner might have to be present on some level, whether they were at the office or something with them. But yes, I think that's the restriction because the states all have their own laws around those things. There has to be them present. But like I said, I'm trying to explore other things.

The licensing process is very, very daunting. To get licensed in all 50 states is just impossible. It would be very expensive too. A lot of the states are allowing a limited license so that you could practice telemedicine in that state without having to get a full license. So those are things that I'm also exploring because I've had to turn away a number of people that would love to just get this testing done. They just don't have anybody that can interpret it for them. So, I am doing that process. But like I said, in the meantime, people can take a trip to California or Washington and as long as they're physically in the States, then I can do the appointment.

Ashley James (2:02:24.502)

Got it. Regardless where someone is, they should reach out to you anyway, just in case, because by the time they've heard this, maybe you have discovered a different avenue of how you can best support people. I just wonder if there's a way, maybe look into this, if there's a way that you can not as their doctor, but it's just as a consultant to answer general questions around something or help someone like point them in the right direction, help them at least decide what labs that they should go do with their chiropractor or whatever, but someone who's like, they're stuck. They're like, I'm stuck. I've done, I've gone this far. I kind of had a loss and maybe like, you could be hired as a consultant to do like little detective work with them. I wonder if that's a possibility because I've seen so many doctors that do, and maybe they're just breaking the rules or I don't know.

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:03:15.513)

Well, and I think that there is probably a lot of that. It's very hard to really police a lot of that, but exactly, no way. Like I said, I am exploring other things because I just feel there's a real deficit. There's a hunger for this knowledge. People really are interested in knowing about it and like what direction to go. I want to be able to provide that in whatever way makes sense for everybody involved. So, I am exploring that.

Ashley James (2:04:00.303)

Cool, well then listeners should check your website out. I'm going to have the link in the show notes, it's with today's podcast at learntruehealth.com so they can go to it and here's the link. It is your name md dot com, so, it’s lauriemartimd.com. Just want to make sure that in case someone's listening and they're driving or something, just go to learntruehealth.com where the show notes are and check out all the information there.

Dr. Lori, it's been so great having you on the show and having this conversation. I think it's really important first of all, our mindset and then knowing that there's a path, knowing there's a way that people who have fibromyalgia no longer have to have it. For some people they've been told you're just going to have it your whole life. You can get to the point where you're no longer in chronic pain. Like Lyme, I know people who've completely, 100% reversed all symptoms of Lyme and no longer have those co-infections and they're feeling amazing. They went from like being bedridden to like just running marathons. We can overcome. The body can overcome. The cool thing is that there's stuff that Dr. Laurie does able to help us with. We figure it out, get to the root cause, look at our epigenetics, uncover what's going on, make sure we're giving ourselves the nutrition, that there's a game plan. We got to make sure we're taking ourselves to the doctor and always always believe your body wants to heal itself and can heal itself. We just have to learn what to give our body to help our body heal itself and that's why functional medicine doctors are so important because they're here to help us figure that out and I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for everything you do and is there anything you want to say to wrap up today's interview? I know you've said so much but is there anything that we left unsaid or you want to make sure that you say before we wrap up today's interview?

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:05:59.783)

Well, I did want to reiterate, I don't want to discourage people that aren't in California or Washington. I do have a contact. Contact me on my website. Send me an email. If you're not in Washington or California, just send me an email, explain your situation. I will look into what options that might be possible. I'll look into it. So just don't be discouraged if you're not from one of those states because I'm really working on trying to expand to help as many people as I feasibly can, because we're under a lot of assault in our world and we need to be more resilient. I think just understanding having some education in this space is so empowering to every individual. If you're interested in exploring those things, I will do my best to try to help.

Ashley James (2:07:11.119)

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I feel like it's so empowering and enlightening for those to know that there are these avenues. There's these pathways. It's worth diving in and exploring because it can be for so many people life changing.

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:07:28.055)

Yes, I agree. Thank you again for having me.

Ashley James (2:07:32.467)

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Get Connected with Dr. Laurie Marti

Website – https://www.lauriemartimd.com/