Understanding Blood Chemistry For a Better, Healthier Life with James LaValle
Blood work is uncomfortable for many people, but an absolute necessity for us to live our healthiest life. Common blood tests that are received at physicals or check ups give us a broad perspective at what’s going on inside of our bodies, but there are other options to give us the specifics on many biological functions and nutrient deficiencies. It’s easier and more affordable than ever to find the answers you’re looking for through blood testing. Of course knowing how to interpret those results is equally important as getting the tests.
Meet James:
On this week’s episode we speak with James LaValle. James is an internationally recognized clinical pharmacist, author, and board certified nutritionist. He’s the founder and board chairman of Metabolic Code, whose goal is to improve lab values and develop personalized therapies to discover underlying metabolic issues that keep people from feeling their best. We talk about his book, Your Blood Never Lies: How to Read A Blood Test For A Longer, Healthier Life and talk all about the importance of blood testing to live your best, most vital life.
Some Topics We Discuss:
How are reference ranges determined? (8:40)
How to look at blood work as a way of being at your best possible function vs having disease. (10:06)
What does it mean for your blood work to be trending? (12:20)
Some Key Takeaways from this Episode:
Blood work is the key to discovering the state of your health and what you can do to improve it. (5:45)
No one's going to take care of you better than you are. (7:25)
Products + Resources:
Get Social with James:
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL SHOW TRANSCRIPT
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Hey everyone, welcome back to The Holistic Navigator Podcast where we talk about all things holistic health and believe in the body's ability to heal itself if given the proper nutrients and care. We just want to say welcome to any new listeners. We might have we're so glad that you found your way here. My [00:01:00] name is Brian Strickland. I'm the producer of the show and I'm joined in the studio today by our host Ed Jones. Our goal is to educate anyone who may be interested in learning more about natural holistic healing and today we're excited to speak with James LaValle. He's an internationally recognized clinical pharmacist, author, board-certified clinical nutritionist, and expert in Integrative Health. He's best known for his expertise in metabolic issues, but we're going to talk to him today about his book Your Blood Never Lies and discuss the importance of knowing your individual blood work number for optimal health. So with that being said, let me go ahead and throw it over to the host of your show, Mr. Ed Jones.
Ed Jones: All right. Thank you Brian so much for that introduction. And yes, I am Ed Jones with the Holistic Navigator. And today I have been looking forward to this interview for some quite some time especially after I read the gentleman's book that I have been passionate about [00:02:00] the topic for 20 plus years. And James LaValle is a nationally recognized clinical pharmacist, author, board-certified clinical nutritionist, and founder of Metabolic Code Enterprises, which is a web platform in practice solution enterprise and it includes unique and highly effective metabolic code protocols, which is dealing with prevention approaches to healthcare. He also has been an author of 16 ebooks and 20 regular books and his latest one unless he's got one that I don't know about is actually the one we're going to speak about today, which is Your Blood Never Lies. Welcome. Dr. LeValle to the Holistic Navigator.
James LaValle: It is great to be here. Good morning.
Ed Jones: Good morning to you. And before if you don't mind, I always am a rambler about my own experiences. So let me tell you and tell the listeners about 20 years ago [00:03:01] or somewhere around there, I think it became legal for walk-in labs to open where you could actually not have to go to your physician to get blood work. Well guess what? I became addicted to? And that was blood testing of my own body and I started this blood testing addiction like I said somewhere around 18 to 20 years ago and within about six years I had probably if you stacked it all there were stacked all together about five inches high of every blood test known to man. Well, that, of course, allowed me to you know journey into the deep recesses of what does it really mean? How can I utilize this information to my best ability and then hopefully help other people? Because here's the catch people. If you think that your normal physical or your insurance blood work that you are getting is going to truly create the ability to have optimal health, [00:04:01] you're badly mistaken because those tests are really for one purpose: that is to see if you have a disease. It's not going to help you put together the plan of how do we produce optimal health. And so when I read your book, Dr. LeValle about the blood testing, I mean literally and I'm not telling a fib here just because I'm talking to you. I'm going to order probably seventy two of those books next week because I'm going to pass those out to the healthcare practitioners. I'm going to sell them at discounts to every person that we refer to blood testing because it is so usable. It is the only book I've seen that the consumer could take and actually know what they're doing when they look at these blood values. So again, welcome to the Holistic Navigator and you know, seven minutes here and you've suddenly said seven words, so I want you to [00:05:01] tell me, you know, maybe Tell me about this. Am I wrong on anything that I've just said first off?
James LaValle: No, you're not. And first of all, thank you. I mean I put about two and a half years into that book to try to really give people clear guidance. One of the biggest things in my practice over the last 38 years of really working in this space and I've been working on the optimization and vitality for whether it was a cancer case, an autoimmune case, diabetes case, world class athlete. Everybody deserves vitality everybody deserves to feel that through all stages of their life. And I think when you don't look at your blood test people spend more time researching the next refrigerator, they're going to buy for the next car. They're going to buy then researching their health and I think a lot of it's because nobody teaches them about it. And so, you know, I just kept finding myself explaining lab tests to people [00:06:01] over and over and over again. I had the largest clinic in the country doing Integrative Medicine through the 90s and the early 2000s in Cincinnati, Ohio where we were doing 400 cases a week at times all on personalized health. Because you know, what's right for you may not be right for me. That's one of my biggest critiques of even our natural product industry is that everybody should go paleo. Everybody should go keto. Well, maybe you should do a blood test and find out when you eat that way whether it's good for you or not. And that's just the kind of the tip of the spear right? It's what's the right foods I should be eating and then the next piece is how do I begin to manage numbers that aren't optimum so I can get them there. And of course the third piece is well if I'm how I know if I'm out of range if I don't test for it. And don't rely on your practitioner necessarily and look I trained thousands of doctors [00:07:01] a year. I’m the clinical co-chair I educated on the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine. So I teach a lot and you know, you can't just think that the doc. I've had cases where people had stage three renal disease and nobody was telling them. It was just a low reading on their kidney output. So I think it's really important for people to actually empower themselves so that they can feel well because no one's going to take care of you better than you are. You need to be the captain. And you pick the team players that are going to work with you whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a dietician, a health coach, or a trainer or physical therapist. Whatever. The reason is, you're the one that's supposed to be guiding that ship.
Ed Jones: Wow, so well-spoken. In fact, it sounds like I echo that so often in all the people I deal with and I love the fact that you're saying the same exact thing which is we have to [00:08:01] create a team approach. We have to empower ourselves. And know that you know, and you're right most people spend more time looking at their learning their new cell phone than they do anything about their own body. And the fact is that you know, we need our regular doc. We want the conventional wisdom. We want to know that if we have a broken leg, a heart attack or a strep throat. They're there to serve us and they do very well. But because it's more of a sick care system than a healthcare System, don't rely on them giving you the first off to order the right blood work there not going to do normally and secondly, they're not going to interpret it to the to the level that you are speaking of Dr. LaValle, which is not just staying in normal reference ranges, but trying to learn what is optimal because I mean you tell me how do they come up with reference ranges? Because I tell people that they take a bunch of people and knock out the top two or three percent of the bottom two or three percent and the rest is reference. Is that about accurate?
James LaValle: [00:09:02] Pretty accurate and that's why you'll see Variations, I mean with our cloud-based informatics lab analysis that we do we regularly see adjustments from labs. So, you know, the lab would normally be for any say 15 to 20 or 10 to 20 and then all of a sudden a lab shows up and it's wait a second. It just changed from 12 to 22 and you know makes you a little crazy. But you know, it's absolutely true that there's just a it's a population based norm and that's kind of the way it's looked at. Now that being said obviously with the kind of the ability to look at analytics and the ability to really start to target conditions and then map those back against labs. I think we're starting to get a little more accuracy of when things are good and when things are starting to turn bad, but at the same time, I think we're in the infancy [00:10:02] of it when it comes to wellness. It's exactly what you said when you know when we developed our lab protocols and what we did and we really try to emphasize that you know, why our metabolic code assessment, it's about how far you're away from being well. It's not about do you have a disease? It’s how far is your chemistry away from acting and its best possible function? Because I think people they just don't have a clue about that. I mean Wellness exams today or if you're a man is your annual prostate exam and you getting your lipids checked, right? That's the extent. It's not, it's not truly digging in and finding out where you're weak and where you're strong.
Ed Jones: Absolutely and I know you also recognize this heavily is chronic inflammation is at the root of most of our diseases that we dread as we age and you know, I know because people share so much with me. I work six days a week and you know, we [00:11:02] just deal with a lot of people and none of these conventional practitioners are even speaking about how do we look at your chronic inflammation in blood work? And then once we look at it, what do we do about it? Well, you know your book again I go back to it. Not only does it explain in very easy terms what does the blood work mean? What do we really want to see on it? And then you give options both drug wise and in supplement form of how to attain more optimal levels. And it's just a perfect blending and every physician should have your book even though it's fairly simple reading for them. They don't know this stuff. You know that I know that they simply don't know it and in fact, I have physicians who asked me about sometimes what is the optimal for ferritin because I know like that's one of the many tests that I talked about and you know, I don't I don't recall instantly but ferritin ranges, I think are somewhere between 30 and 288 [00:12:02] or something well, Harp all the time that if we have ferritin over a hundred, I think it's damaging the mitochondria. But on a blood test of a man or woman could be at 270 and their doc says, “Oh you're fine. It's all fine.” No, it's not. And the other thing that I want you to address here is and I know I read it in your book is trending. You know, what we mean by trending is if you actually charted all of it if I charted all of that blood work that I did back 20 years ago. There's going to be trends or it's either going to go a little up or little down. And why would we wait 14 years for us to finally get red-flagged when every single year we see something starting to decrease? Let’s say GFR for a kidney function. Why would you wait till it's 59 before you're even talking about it or 49. Let's start if it's an 84 and it went to 80, 76-72. How asinine is it that someone doesn't take that [00:13:02] torch and say hey we need to talk about about this? Let's see what we can do to slow this down. I mean isn't that right?
John LaValle: That's a hundred percent right. And you know, I think one of the most blatant examples of that was the Kaiser Permanente study where they looked I believe it was at 47,000 lives approximately. I think it was 46,572 lives over 10 years and what they did is they grouped everybody in that study in the normal ranges of blood glucose. So it went under 84, 84 to 89, 92- 94 and 95 to 99. So everyone was basically not a diabetic and not pre-diabetic at the beginning of this 10-year trial. And the only way you get out of the trials if you develop diabetes or if you died, which is a bad way to get out of a trial. And [00:14:02] what they found out was that for every point above 84 it represented a six percent risk of being a type 2 diabetic in the next decade. So if I have a 95 blood sugar, so 85 to 95 is 10 points x 6 percent. I have a 60 percent risk of being a diabetic when I have a 95 blood sugar, which is considered normal.
Ed Jones: And the thing is when you waste 8 to 14 years just thinking you're okay, you know the window, the window of opportunity does decrease with years and especially with Father Time. I mean, you know, a forty-year-old can heal and do things quicker for their body than a 60 year old can, so why would you wait? And I read that study this morning actually out of your book and I I'm going to make all of my health educators. They're going to read [00:15:02] and study this book and I'm going to test them on your book. Now when you talk about the other the blood testing you're doing is that something that people can access this not in your town or what? Can you tell me about that?
James LaValle: Sure. Well the whole basis of what I developed it. You know, it's one thing and you know, you are obviously a student of the blood and which is fantastic and you know this it's one thing if you have a blood sugar of 95 but if you have a blood sugar of 95 and your blood pressure is 135 over 90 and your serum potassium is below 4.5 which means you have a four-fold risk of being diabetic, and your serum magnesium has below two, and your LDL cholesterol and oxidized cholesterol is elevated, and your GFR or your kidney filtration is down below 70. Now you've got multiple numbers that [00:16:02] correlate to being insulin resistant. And that should create a factoring effect for that individual. Meaning that it starts to stack up and create more relevance based on a clustering of the information that goes on and so when we came out with that I've been you know, obviously I've done this work for quite a few years and we I really wanted to focus on that. Like how can you begin to test whether and stack the lab data together so that it points you to where you should begin, you know, where is the most important part? Because one of my pet peeves and and my space is it everybody says things like when in doubt start with the gut right? So what if I don't have a gut problem, maybe the reason my gut’s messed up is because my cortisol is really high and I got a gut permeability problem because of elevated interleukin 6, right. [00:17:02] So I mean, it doesn't make sense that we just say when in doubt start with the gut. it and it also doesn't make sense to say everybody should take a multi, a probiotic, a vitamin D, and a fish oil. And I don't disagree that those aren't valuable and people could benefit from it. But for a lot of people they get pill fatigued by the time I get to what they really need meaning what their blood tests say they need right now to reverse negative Trends in their labs. Then they don't want to take 12 bottles of pills. Not everybody wants to do that. So it's how can I target the biggest problems first? And that's what our metabolic code platform does and it's you know, I'm really proud of it. I mean it was five years of passionate work and working with algorithms and very high-end IT and Tech folks that we really put together [00:18:02] something that makes it easy for the consumer and I once again, I thank you so much for realizing the effort it takes to write a book for consumers to understand labs because it was it was mind-numbing at times. And so that we can sit down and really quickly explain and share that information that's going to transform their lives because it In the end that's why we do this right? I'm in it because I want people to feel better. That's why I do what I do.
Ed Jones: This is exciting stuff and I want to know so down the road you're saying a few weeks you will be able to offer this and we can we do this through the holistic Navigator where we can have the link and then they can access this amazing piece of therapy and information. Is that going to be available?
James LaValle: Yes it will.
Ed Jones: Okay so I can tell listeners right now that we will under our website we will have the link and [00:19:02] on and also on this podcast that they can access that particular program on their own. And secondly we do have on the Holistic Navigator under products you can scroll down to a lab that we can all still have right now online where they can order discounted blood work if they want and go to their local draw station in each town. So we're going to expand options on this particular conversation endlessly in the future because it is not being addressed. You're not getting it at your normal physicals. You're not getting it on insurance exams. And I hate to be I don't mean to be harsh to the conventional people. But I've literally never seen more incompetence in the past five years in this field of medicine that I did in the previous 37. I do have one question and it's really kind of a dig it into just your big warehouse of knowledge. I'm a huge fan of many looking at many factors [00:20:02] but lipoprotein a is one that I've really had a difficult time on helping people to lower that number. Do you have any magic information on lipoprotein a because it is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and it's something that isn't checked by most physicians, but I'm really concerned when people have levels of over 50 to 60. What would you say about that?
James LaValle: Well, you know you bring up a great problem that we have is that you know but you know their topic in being published in papers now. You know, like 20 years ago. I wrote a book called Cracking the Metabolic Code and it was all about this. It's your metabolism that is more about what you burn; your metabolism dictates your future health. And if depending on what system of your body's broken down or what you've been exposed to or the kind of diet you have, or the stress you're under, or the amount of exercise you get you can trigger metabolic inflammation. And so, the new term out in the literature is meta formation, [00:21:02] which is you know, short for metabolic inflammation and interestingly the first sign of low-grade inflammation in your body are the bad actor lipoproteins. So, you know when I look at lpas or I look at Apo lipoprotein b here. I look at my lab peroxidase, or I look at oxidized LDL or I look at adiponectin levels that are dropping. I immediately know if they are trending high that there is a source of low-grade inflammation in that individual. And it could be I have to go through that on my checklist. What is their stress like? What is their sleep? Like do they have apnea? Are they insulin resistant? Do they have an environmental burden? What drug history have they been on? You know what's the diet that they eat? For example, if they're [00:22:02] are on the keto craze they're going to trigger more bad lipoproteins. And so for LPA, obviously that's people that are more prone to insulin resistance more people that are more inherent towards type 2 diabetes. And so I first look at well, what are they doing? Are we correcting for that and then if that isn't working obviously there's things like using high-dose nice and are in particular one of my favorites for that is aged garlic extract. So if you look at the clinical trials on aged garlic extract, which there's 850 papers published on each garlic extract in humans. I mean UCLA's head of Cardiology Interventional cardiologist Matthew Budoff, you know he's done coronary artery scores on people and seeing them regress. They're vulnerable plaque and seeing their blood vessels return to normal arterial stiffness. I love aged garlic extract. [00:23:02] I love using niacin in that regard. But more importantly you have to dig in and find where is the inflammation coming from? Is it a biotoxin exposure like mold? Is it a vector? Did they get a bug? You know, do they have chronic yeast problems or dysbiosis? You know, where is that inflammation at? You've got you said it earlier and I was jumping up and down here in my office that inflammation is at the root of why we age. That's why the term inflam-aging is out now in the clinical literature. So when you look at it what you and I are really trying to do with people is look at their blood tests, look at their urine tests and sometimes I'll get their saliva test and go, where is the problem? Where is the leak in the ship? And sometimes it hasn't even shown up in the blood yet. It's just barely [00:24:02] percolating in the blood yet, but with a thorough history and a good subjective survey along with biometrics, you can start to piece together that super early warning sign and signaling process going on. So that's kind of how I approach LPA. It's actually how I approach everything.
Ed Jones: I hope people listening can understand that they're not getting this information at conventional places that they're going and there's again there's nothing wrong with that but we need to assemble the team that can speak this language that you just said which is being a detective and looking further and digging deeper and connecting the dots. Because you know, and I'll say this so often we are not automobiles that have specific pieces so that if you have a cylinder that has an issue you just replace the cylinder. You don't worry about it how it connects to the carburetorinto the fuel tank. That's not us. We're like a spider web and you touch one part of it is going to resonate [00:25:02] to all parts of that spider web. You gotta ask yourself. Okay, I'm not really doing this. So what's my next step and that's where you know, I hope that we can educate you you can access Dr. LaValle's system soon. You can access the blood work we have to that accessing doesn't mean you're going to get the interpretation which you truly need. I'm going to recommend again to purchase your book that is available. Is it on is I'm sure it's on Amazon and everywhere?
James LaValle: Yeah, and I've got some books coming out too. By the way you mentioned do I have any new books coming out? I have a reprise of The Metabolic Code coming out on it's basically 20th anniversary, which will go into metaformation in depth. It's going to go through all these things and I'm kind of exposed the way we look at things and all of it is evidence-based. I mean, we collect all the evidence and all the papers that [00:26:02] go behind everything we say so this isn't the world according to Jim LaValle. This is the world according to the best research that's been published.
Ed Jones: Wow. I see that I'm actually on your page that says references for the book that I do want everyone to order called Your Blood Never Lies: How to read a blood test for a longer healthier life. I mean just like and I'm a huge fan of aged garlic like this one reference here aged garlic extract retards progression of coronary artery calcification. I think you and I talked on my radio show Vital Health Radio when I'm on there with Dr. Greene my co-host and you had called in and he is conventional but he's open-minded. He now recommends Kyolic aged garlic to so many of his patients based on your convincing studies that you were speaking about, which is pretty damn impressive because he's not one to really grab this stuff. And I think you were on about a year and a half ago. And I love the fact that [00:27:02] you know you embrace both all the world and you'd embrace whatever works in a safe manner. Sometimes we need drugs a lot of times. We need supplements. We need we need to have education all this is in your your pile of goodies. And so anything else you want to leave the listeners with that some jewels of information.
James LaValle: Well, I think the most two important pieces it all starts with lifestyle. It's like you said, you know people get a bag of genes and they think oh I either got good genes or bad. And if you're a unicorn maybe you make it a long time on that but in the end what influences your health is the decisions you make on your life and what happens to you and what you get exposed to in your life. So the more resilient you can be, the more you can take charge. You know, I always start with today, people eat too much they They too often pick the wrong foods. They eat too late. They're under tremendous stress and don't do anything about it and they don't get enough sleep. [00:28:02] And before you even go and another step forward you have and they don't move enough. So, you know, you have to start to think about am I going to have a lifestyle that promotes health? How important is feeling good to me? And you know, I turned 60 this year and you know I go into the gym. I was just in South America training in the gym. And you know, I'm pretty very low body fat. I used to be a pretty competitive athlete. So I mean at age 60, I'm looking pretty good. Most people think I'm you know, maybe 50 maybe in my late 40s. So one for the gray hair and yeah. I had this young man came up to me and said how old are you? And I said, well, I'm going to be 60 in a couple months and you know his jaw dropped and he said how do you do it? Yeah, haha. Oh, you know what? I take care of myself and my brother died from the complications of kidney disease, [00:29:02] heart failure, and being 476 pounds. My mother died of dementia and because of her obesity. My father is God bless us a unicorn. He's 89 years old and despite being a diabetic from the age of 40 he's now going to be 90 this year and you know battle, you know, he's battled through adenocarcinoma of the intestine and he is still around though. I'm lucky there. But it all is about taking action and no one is going to take care of your health like you are. You must empower yourself and grasp that vitality you deserve. It's going to make you a better father, a better spouse. You're going to be better in the community and you're going to be better in the workplace.
Ed Jones: Man. I love that. What a great inspirational closing because people deserve to feel like a human. They deserve to have the energy to function and to be the person that they were meant to be in this life. The Father, the Son, the daughter of whoever, [00:30:02] the boss. And you know, Father Time can be cruel at a certain point of our life, but it is becoming earlier and earlier. I mean what I'm observing now is the average 50 year old is going through what I used to hear people go through when they were 75 plus but now it's become the norm. So everybody thinks well, this is kind of everybody else is feeling. So I guess this just like I'm gonna do this. No you don't have to give in to that. So Dr. LaValle that you are amazing. I hope we can do another interview in the next three months on a totally different topic because with all of your books coming out, I want to get all of them, and I want to perhaps highlight those and thank you. Thank you so much for taking your time to speak with us today.
James LaValle: All I was my pleasure and you just you name the day man. I'll be on your cast anytime you're kind of person man. I love this.
Ed Jones: Thank you so much. I can tell we resonate very well [00:31:02] together. So thank you take care of yourself. And for everyone listening blessings to everyone. Your health is your wealth. Thank you so much.
Brian Strickland: The information on this podcast in the topics discussed have not been evaluated by the FDA or any one of the medical profession and is not aimed to replace any advice you may receive from your medical practitioner. The Holistic Navigator assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of any purchaser or listener of these materials. The Holistic Navigator is not a doctor or doesn't claim to be please consult your physician before beginning any health regimen.