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Introduction to Functional Medicine by Matt Feret and Paul Burgess [1:09]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security Insider's, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Burgess:

Thanks, Matt. I'm stoked to be here. I've listened to a good few of your shows and looked at the website and I think what's interesting, if you look on Spotify and you look for similar shows, there aren't any, which is showing you that this niche that you are talking to and the stuff that you're putting out is really valuable because there isn't anyone else doing it. So I'm really happy to be here.

Matt Feret:

Thanks Paul. I'm glad you're here too. And that's the big reason why I did it. I was looking for it. And there aren't any, I mean there are financial planning shows and workout shows. I mean there's a lot of specifics, but I'm glad you said that. That's really nice of you to say. I have not looked on Spotify to see that, but I don't know. I kind of like being an army of one of one. It's not a bad place to be. Right.

Paul Burgess:

I think anybody that nowadays can do something that is unique or niche that's not being done in the same way, I think it's brilliant. So more power to you, my friend.

Matt Feret:

Thank you. What a way to start a show. The usual question I have, I'm still going to ask you, but I I'll take that first. Thank you very much. So let me get back to my groove after you gave me a very nice compliment. Tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Paul Burgess:

Right. So my name is Paul Burgess and I own Paul Burgess Functional Medicine, which is a global telemedicine company. Been going for many years now. We were using online before it became fashionable because of a virus that went around a few years ago. I don’t know if you've heard about it.

Matt Feret:

I've heard about that.

Paul Burgess:

Yes. What we do basically is we treat people in a way that gives them certainty that what they're doing for their own health is the right thing for them. And what I mean by that is most people every day have the same thoughts about what's the best diet for me? Do I need supplements? If I need supplements, which supplements and how much of them do I need to take? And is there an exercise program? Which one's best for me? Or how do I get my sleep for me? How do I get my memory better and brain clarity better and that kind of thing. And we have this kind of daily questioning in our head. And we're always looking for the answer. And the answer is, oh, let's look at what the latest thing is on YouTube or social media or in the press or on NBC or whatever it is.

But none of it is actually usable because it's all generic. And so what we do is we take patients and we do a very comprehensive background on them. We look at all their bloods, their toxicity, all of their viral bacterial issues, and then we create programs that get them into the best possible health by giving them all the information they need specifically for them. So it's a long process, six to twelve months on some of them and that kind of thing. But it works phenomenally well and it takes away that, well, what do I have to do? Then the next step, once you know everything and everything's in place, you no longer have to worry about it. You no longer have to spend time thinking about that and you can just get on with enjoying your life. The key thing, right? Whilst you are thinking about other things you are missing that day that's just gone by and playing with the kids or the grandkids or spending that time in nature or whatever it is because you've been focused on, oh, what am I going to have for that meal tonight? I still don’t know, should I be having carbs?

And once that goes, you'd be amazed how much more capacity you have. So that's what we do. And a lot of patients will come to us with mild chronic issues or they'll come completely debilitated and we'll have people that are unable to function that we get them completely functioning again back in the job, back in family life, back in everything. Or we get others that are trying to optimize their life, focus on longevity. People are my age, kind of late fifties, and it kind of sharpens our attention to how long have we got left and how do I make it a bit longer? And so we get a lot of people looking for longevity as well, and we deal with all of those things. So it is a real mixture of things dependent on the patient. But yeah, we've been doing it for a couple of decades and it's fantastic. I love it.

Matt Feret:

It's such an interesting concept. Not only the telehealth or telemedicine piece of it, which I definitely want to get into, but it’s been 20 years of doing this.

Paul Burgess:

We certainly were doing it as soon as we were able to get a decent internet connection.

Matt Feret:

You're right. Well, let me nerd out with you for a second. I remember when I had a 2,400 BOD modem and I believe a neighbor down the street had a Commodore 64 that had, it might've been an 80 BOD modem for anyone over the age of 50. You know what I'm talking about. If you've been in technology, but anybody under you have no idea what I'm talking about, right?

Paul Burgess:

It's that noise of the dial up, that kind of attune it makes, that's what separates our generation, right?

Matt Feret:

Yep. Oh my gosh, I can still hear it. I just heard it. I just heard it in my head.

Paul Burgess:

That's it.

Matt Feret:

The personalization piece is so attractive. And I'm just going to take one of those pieces that you mentioned, right? You said supplements and you said, what should I be eating? When should I be eating it? What type should I be eating it? And we didn't even talk about workouts. I mean the diet culture, the supplement culture, the workout culture here, there is so much everywhere. People on TV squawking at us, the internet, my word, just type in a word and good luck from a personal standpoint. You said it, it's exhausting. If you are really trying to pay attention to your health in different ages and stages of your life, you have amazing amount of, I'll say copy. I won't say information. There's an amazing amount of copy at your fingertips online and it's exhausting. And when you think about, well, is there a specific diet?

And there are people out there, and I've interviewed some that say, don't diet, it's a bad word, it's a diet culture. And then there are others that go, Nope, you got to do low carb. Nope, you got to do a personalized diet. It's exhausting. It's exhausting because I'm even one of those guys and I don't consider myself a neurotic person or very nervous, but I still do it. Well, should I eat this now? Well, I worked out well how many calories did I burn? Well, is it a reward system here? Do I get to eat a dessert because I went on a bike ride? It's just how do I stop doing that? Is that getting a personalized plan from someone like yourself to just say, okay, all of the other stuff that you've been worried about and whether or not you should have beef for chicken today, whether or not you should have fish three times a week or two times a week or take omega threes or not. It's exhausting. And I don't think I'm alone in thinking that way.

Personalizing Nutrition and Diet and Functional Medicine with Paul Burgess [9:23]

Paul Burgess:

No. And that's why we're so busy because there is no generic prescription for the human body. We are so complex. We all have different DNA, that's your first problem. So because we're all built different, literally even if you've got identical twins, what you are seeing online or in any kind of media is a generic piece of advice. It says, here's a piece of research to mention what you said. Here's a piece of research that omega threes will bring down inflammation. There were 200-305,000 people, whatever it is in this piece of research, it was done over 12 weeks and we measured at the beginning and the measure at the end, and this is what we saw. Great. What does that got to do with you? Because no one knows in that research group what age you are, what your medical history has been, what current toxic loads you have accumulated, and that you have what your blood glucose is like, what your liver function is like, how your hormones are functioning, what your sleep is like, your stress levels.

No one knows anything about you. They're just saying, this is the thing, lots of people took it and it was fine. But if we know all of you properly, then we can make it specific for you. And we might turn around and say, yeah, omega has actually worked for you because you've got some high cholesterol or you've got some brain fog going on and this can really help with those things. But moreover, there are a dozen other things that will work better for you. And they're the things that we are going to bring into your prescription because we know for you specifically looking at your bloods, looking at your toxicology, looking at your hormones and everything else, we know that these are going to give you far better returns than just taking an omega, for example. So it's impossible to look online and find the answer to your own health. It is just not. But the place is absolutely flooded, like you say, with every opinion. So for example, there are some very big influences that will 100% say if you do not eat just meat, if you don't just follow a carnivore diet, you eat a vegetable, you will die.

And it's true. They're sitting there going, and they'll make a point and make a case very compelling. They'll say, look, vegetables, they have anti-predatory toxins in them so when you eat them, those anti-predatory toxins will destroy you. They will kill you over time and they will cause this, this and this problem. And it's very compelling. Here's all the study. Here's all the real life cases of people that have cured this, that and the other. There are very prominent people who say, look, this is what saved me. All my ailments have gone.

All of my autoimmune disease went. I lost 20 pounds, I stopped snoring. There's some very prominent people that will say that the truth of the matter is they didn't cure anything. All they did was take away the irritants because their gut was so broken that when they were eating vegetables, whatever it is, the amyloids and the lectins and stuff were really promoting a lot of autoimmune disease. They go and eat just meat. They take away all the irritants and hey, presto, they feel better If they have fixed it, then they can go back to eating the vegetables and the grains and so on. The problem is as soon as they go back to eating that stuff, they all their symptoms flare back up again. So all they're doing is treating the symptom, right? There's no root cause addressing there. And at the same time, you have the other side of the coin, which is if you do not go vegan, you will get cancer.

Matt Feret:

I mean this is exhausting, isn't it?

Paul Burgess:

In my practice, for example, for a cancer patient who's just been through chemo, let's say their digestion is going to be in a really bad way. And so we might use a carnivore diet in the short term as an intervention while we get in and repair the damage that's been done so that their gut functions optimally. And then we will titrate them onto a much wider diverse diet. And then within a year they're probably eating everything under the sun and having no problems. Whereas other people they went through chemo with at the same time, they are still having huge digestive issues a year, two years, five years, ten years down the line, it was never addressed. So it can be useful as an intervention. At the same time, sometimes a vegan approach is really useful for certain people, and if it is because you have a certain genetic setup, then that's great. You've got then this other popular one from a couple of years ago, keto and diet is going to cure all your eels and you're going to have all this energy and it's going to be amazing.

Matt Feret:

But you only can eat cauliflower and organic grass fed beef and organic chicken, it's probably $35 a pound and you can't eat, what is it? You can't eat many fruits because it's got sugar, even though everybody else you to eat a lot of fruit and vegetables. I mean, yes, go.

Paul Burgess:

Exactly right. And the other thing about both carnivore and ketogenic diet is just as a default, they tend to be high in saturated fat. And you can do them both actually. You can definitely do a ketogenic diet as a vegetarian 100%. You don't need to eat meat or animal products. But generally people go, well, I can eat fatty steak and burger patties and use the full fat cream and all this stuff that tastes amazing.

Matt Feret:

You can pour butter in your coffee. I've read.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah. Which again is another interesting concept. I'm not even going to get into that. We could be here for hours.

Matt Feret:

That just blew your mind, right? It made you go let it reboot.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah. But here's the thing, saturated fat is really problematic for about 25% of the population. And so, there's a percentage of the population that have what's called an APOE four genotype. I'm one of them. And so it's not unusual. One out of four people and for our genotype, saturated fat will promote inflammation, insulin resistance. Now think about that. A fat that will disturb your glucose metabolism, it will cause inflammatory liver markers and it will cause Alzheimer's or dementia, any of those cognitive issues. And so, if I went on a ketogenic diet and then did something like CrossFit, which I have done in the past, by the way-

Matt Feret:

Me too.

Paul Burgess:

And so, CrossFit is a really high intensity, very, very oxidative stress on the body, and then you're eating a very high fat diet. All of those things will work polar opposite to what my genes need. It'll cause inflammation. It will cause liver issues, dementia, insulin resistance, all kinds of horrible things for 25% of the population. Now, some of these influencers that have got a million people and more, that tells us that 250,000, a quarter of a million on average, people that will listen to them and take their advice are very likely going to cause themselves a huge amount of damage. And so unless the person knows you personally, has your history, knows everything about you, knows your genetics, knows everything that they need to know, it's not possible to construct a valuable program that serves you for your health and your longevity and your cognitive function, your sleep, your sex drive and everything else.

It's just not possible. Just because they tell you lots of other people are doing it, it has no relevance to you. And that's the problem. So yeah, I mean you could talk about anything. You could talk about an exercise program, you could talk about other diets. You could talk about specific supplements that, oh, this person said this is the greatest thing in the world for improving testosterone, but it might've been in certain people, but actually in you, it's probably going to cause other problems if we don't know all the story. So very difficult to find out and which is where we come in to that place where it says, okay, you don't need to find out. It's not your job. This is what we do. This is my job. I understand it. Trust me on this. We'll give you everything that you need and that will create this amazing life because you'll feel so much better. And that's where, like you say, the confusion is you can't get around it.

How Functional Medicine Understands and Personalizes Healthcare with Paul Burgess [18:38]

Matt Feret:

No, you can't. For anybody paying attention to their health, functional medicine sounds really hyper-personalized medicine because you're sitting here talking and I'm thinking, well, I go to my GP or my PCP over here and I get my blood test drawn and I get to see my liver function and my glucose and it's a snapshot in time. And then I get a little report in my inbox about four days later after the lab gets back, and then I've got a range and it says higher or lower or somewhere in that range. And Doc goes, looks good. And that's it. But that is not what you do. Can you explain a little bit about your process? If I'm brand new and I'm coming to you going, I like this approach, what happens?

Paul Burgess:

Yeah. So firstly, we have an initial call, which is free. You'd be glad to know everyone can sit down and talk to us about anything to do with their health and the issues that they're having. And if we think they're appropriate with us and we've got a good way forward for them, then we'll discuss it further. Some people are just not the right fit, and we would advise them to go and do something else first. But we'll have a full consult, talk about what's going on, fill out a bit of a questionnaire, and then bloods, for example, you brought up a really good point. The physician that you go to will do a specific panel of bloods. They're generally quite small because insurance is paying for it, and insurance will not pay for the expensive markers. It'll pay for what they feel as though it necessary.

So like you say, you might get your fasting glucose, which is what your sugar was at the exact time that you took the bloods, and then you might get something called HBA-1-C, which is your three month average glucose. And they'll look at both of those and they're in the range and go, yeah, you're fine. It doesn't really tell you anything because they're two issues. One, the ranges are so wide that they use, and those two markers are pretty benign and can be influenced by lots of things. So for example, if you got up that morning and you were having a fasted blood test, but you were slightly late and you were quickly trying to rush to get to your appointment for the blood draw, your glucose will go up because the stress will release glucose from your liver and that will bump it, and then your glucose is up on the day of the test and the Doc says, you need to take something for glucose. It's got pre-diabetes. And you go, well, hang on a minute. How have you brought that out of just literally a fasted glucose number? Which is very, very transient. You could have done that five minutes later and be completely different.

Matt Feret:

Really. I mean, I've thought of the same thing in a parallel, which is if I'm late, which let's be honest, going to the doctor I normally am in the morning. I'm running in there, and they go, “Hey, welcome. Insurance the same?” I go, “Yeah.” They're like, “Great, come back here. We'll take your blood pressure and your heart rate.” And I'm like, I just finished walking up the stairs. I'm late. I know I'm stressed. And I mean, I know it's not going to be my resting heart rate. It can't be correct.

Paul Burgess:

Exactly. And so that whole process, that's just what we talk about, one marker, right? The bit of glucose that you imagine all the others that can be affected by these things. So, when the Doctor says, let's get your bloods done. They get the bloods done, the patient rings back a week later, how was it? The doctor says everything's normal. There's nothing wrong. You go, okay, why do I feel like this? And then, we're not really sure. Here's some Prozac, come back and see.

But unfortunately, as comic as it sounds, that is the actual how things pan out. And so two things. One, the reason everything is normal is because the ranges are so wide that pretty much everybody falls into a normal range. And if you've fallen outside of that range, there's something serious going on. Even more interesting is you fall outside the range and the doctor looks at it goes, okay, let's get a retest in three months. Let's just see what happens. And I'm not putting down doctors, I want to make this perfectly clear. They are extremely good people. They went into their profession with every intention of helping as many people as they can. I have a company that trains functional medicine practitioners and we see a large percentage of people coming on our course that are physicians and they're trying to leave the profession because they know it doesn't work as well as treating the root cause, right?

So they're treating symptoms all the time, right? People's going there, I've got a headache, here's an aspirin, my back hurts. Okay, here's some ibuprofen. I've got this chest infection. Okay, here's the antibiotic. But there's no, and the good ones really are cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer, diabetes. All of these things are symptoms. Okay? Cancer is a symptom and the oncology team will treat the cancer, but what caused it? We've got so many examples of people that we have tested that have had cancer historically, then got it treated with their chemo and so on, and then it comes back again five years later, whatever it is, and we test them and we see, look, you've got four different mold infections that are all known to be carcinogenic and you've got three different chemical toxins in you also known to cause DNA damage and cancer. That being the case, we need to get rid of these so that you don't get another recurrence, not just treat the cancer.

Obviously treat the cancer is important, right? But no one's looking at that root cause. So going back to the bloods, we are only looking for root causes of things, and so are using a much narrow narrower range. So it's an optimal range, and we have a much bigger report. So your report from your doctor might be two pages, three pages long, and you'll have maybe an H or an L next to the marker if it's too high or too low, right? Yep. A basic report for us is 77 pages. And it covers everything. But more importantly, when people are in the doctor's range, but they're starting to drift out of optimal, they're going slightly too high, slightly too low, we can tell either something is about to happen or has started happening. And it is far easier to turn it around at that stage than it is to wait until it goes outside the doctor's range where you have a full-blown illness and then you are looking at pharmaceuticals and trying to turn it around and bring everything back on track.

And that's much more difficult. I've seen cancer in people way before. A doctor has, in fact, one of more than one actually, but one particular one I can think of is when his results came back, I said to him, look, just for housekeeping, I'd like you to go and see your primary care physician and get a prostate examination just for housekeeping. Let's just rule it out as an issue. Okay, fine. So he goes to the doctor and he says, look, this guy's told me to come and get this test done. And the doctor said, look, you don't need it. I've seen your results. Your PSA is fine. Prostate specific antigen is absolutely normal. There's no reason for this test. And the guy said, look, I've got to be honest with you, now I'm here and he said this, I'd like to get done. Oh, okay, doctor does it.

And then, oh, actually, yeah, okay, it doesn't feel right. Let's get an examination done. And anyway, stage two tumors, one stage two cancer. They would not have seen that for, I don’t know, maybe another three years because the numbers were way within the normal range, but because they were slightly trending out of what we saw, and the combination of them tells us, go and have a look at this. This could be the issue. And so our reports will look at everything. And then the combined landscape of the markers will give us a much more in depth understanding as to what's really going on underneath. Is there some metabolic syndrome problems, which is basically your cells and the metabolism, your cells is under stress and not working properly. Okay, if that's the case, why? Let's have a look at that. What is your cholesterol level?

What is your cholesterol? LDL particle size? If you just get your cholesterol done at the GP or the PCP doesn't really tell you the ones that are important. It tells you a total tells you an LDL HDL might tell you a ratio, and that's it. The LDL, which is supposed bad stuff, they have particle sizes, different sizes, and the bigger they are, the less harmful they are. They're small or what they call medium-sized. They can be really predictive of cardiovascular disease. Another quick example. Forty years old, looks really fit, goes to the gym every morning, gets in his sauna, gets in the plunge pool, does all of the bio hacks and stuff, eats really well. He comes to me and says, “Oh, I just want to get a checkup, just check me out and see what's going on.” And he really wanted to measure how well he was doing, which was fine.

And we did the bloods. And I said to him, this report, I'm concerned. This is coming up with a very high cardiovascular disease risk and for your age it's concerning. And his cholesterol was really quite high and the makeup, the particle size was really bad. And it's like something definitely going on here. And I said to him, have you got any family history of cardiovascular disease? He goes, oh yeah, yeah, my dad had a heart issue and so on. I said, okay. And this particular guy is very proactive. And I said to him, look, we've done some toxicity testing, let's wait for that to come in and let's talk more about what potentially is the way forward. In the interim, while he was waiting for the second test results, he went and he happens to be based in London, and he went to a very high-end cardio clinic and got the top scan and heart investigation and just went all in. Must have.

Matt Feret:

Yeah.

Paul Burgess:

And then he sends me the results and he says, oh look, I just want to send you these. It doesn't look too bad. And I'm thinking, well, hang on a minute. Obviously he's trying to test the theory of the reports that we've got, right? Says, oh, it's if it's really working. Sure. And I look at the report and his heart, the structure is fantastic. He's really fit his heart. All the chambers are working really well. But what he didn't realize is the very top line of the report said the amount of plaque that is deposited in his arteries puts him in the 90th percentile for a cardiovascular event. And what that means is, if I was to bet on that man having a cardiovascular event like a heart attack, something really quite terrible happening to him, if I was to bet on it, I would've a 90% chance of winning my bet.

And I highlighted that to him, and he said, “Oh, I didn't see that bit.” Okay. But what it did was it just proved that looking at the bloods, the way we do in the reports that we use can really see things that are going on underneath that no one else is picking up unless you go for these really expensive scans and so on. Had we not have done that test on him, he would've merrily gone on his way, kept living his life, he's got some young children and everything else, and probably within the next four to five years suffered quite a bad coronary event. And obviously now we are treating him and he's very, very happy and we're doing a lot of stuff with him. So it doesn't matter what the issues are, we can really pick them up. And these are in quite young people that we're talking about, right?

Once we get into these, my age, nearly late fifties knocking sixty, you really start picking up anything that you've accumulated through your lifetime. And that's where really the majority of our work is done in a place where let's get clear the decks, let's get rid of everything that's in there that no one else is looking at because they're all looking at the symptoms at the other end. And let's make sure that those symptoms either never come or they're pushed on way further. So yeah, so I'm not sure if that answered your question. I went off on a bit of a rant.

Matt Feret:

No, it did. It was fascinating. That's why I didn't interrupt you. I wanted to hear that through. And the examples are shocking. I mean, we've all heard stories. I've got a personal one, fine health, went to the doctor a couple months ago, everything's great, and dead of a heart attack under the age of fifty. And people go, wow, he died young or she died young. Or how about the colon cancers that are now afflicting? There's a guy I went to high school with that, I think forty, died. Soccer player or football player, right? Soccer player and goalie. And I mean in shape. We're not talking 350 pounds with an internship at McDonald's here. We're talking normal.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up, Matt. The artificial turf that soccer players use or any athletics use the base of it is what's called crumbed rubber. They get the old tires and other bits of them, they rum it and they make this soft bouncy material out of it.

Matt Feret:

You can see it on TV when somebody gets tackled or falls down, it kind of poofs up on high def TVs.

Paul Burgess:

That's it. And they also use it in children's playgrounds when they fall, when we were kids, if you fell, it was concrete.

Matt Feret:

And now with dirt that had been packed down for decades and might as well have been concrete.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah. But now they've got this soft material, 100%. It's known and proven that that material has been shown to cause cancer. And so you are getting these young players that are on this stuff every day, they're rolling around in it, up, down, doing whatever they're doing. And your example is a perfect one. Goalkeeper probably spends more time on the floor than he does standing up and he gets cancer at a very young age. These toxins are everywhere. And the longer the modern world goes on, the more these toxins are being produced. These chemicals are really quite destructive. And if you know how hard it is and how much effort you need to put in every day just to be healthy, you'll wonder how we even get through a day because there's so much stuff.

Matt Feret:

That's what I mean. It's exhausting. I mean, you're sitting here talking about it. I'm going, yeah, forever chemicals. That's a phrase that's been in the news, what for the last six months, but not prior to. They've done a lot of testing over here in the US on public water and testing public water for, and then now there are reports you can dig through to figure out whether or not your own tap water has these forever chemicals, Paul, it's just one more thing. You're like, oh my God. I mean, can I not even drink my own tap water now, what do I do? But forever chemicals, I have to imagine, even though they've been named I think relatively recently, are things that you're talking about in terms of what's getting into your system and what's already there and how to treat them.

Toxins and Common Forever Chemicals with Paul Burgess [35:19]

Paul Burgess:

Hundred percent. So forever chemicals are just that. They're things that the body doesn't know how to remove. You can remove them if you know how to do it properly and use the correct way. But think about just a little while ago, and Erin Brockovich, which is a famous case in that film where Julia Roberts played that part. Erin Brockovich is active on social media and she still is trying to deal with things of a similar nature, but that hexavalent chromium, which was 100% caused so many DNA mutations and all these people that were sick and all the rest of it, that's nothing. If you go back even further in time, there's a company called DuPont who had all sorts of chemicals, and I think in the majority of the world now you can find traces of DuPont chemicals in most people. I think that's a true statement, but by all means, look it up.

But things like your frying pan, the non-stick coating is 100% a problem. Things like your tap water, I would not suggest anybody drinks tap water. So for us with a patient, we will supply them with a reversal osmosis water filter so that they can put their tap water in there and it takes out 99.9% of everything because your tap water, not only does it have all these things added to it to bleach it and clean it, but they cannot get rid of a lot of the medications that people take. Now, what that means is tap water is generally recycled. So in London for example, tap water has been through about seven people. By the time it gets to you because you drink it, you wee in the toilet, it goes into the refinery and comes back into tap. But everyone that takes the birth control pill, everyone that takes heart medication, antidepressants, a lot of those medications will not be removed in the refining process before it comes back into the water supply.

And so what you'll find is people getting more and more estrogenic because there's more of these estrogens in the water that they're drinking, people getting more and more toxicity or things that are going really peculiar, putting weight on, and they can't understand why and they're drinking all this water and it's full of this stuff. So I certainly wouldn't use municipal tap water, but there are so many examples of that. I'll tell you what, if people are listening still, they haven't turned off already. There's a great app which I found recently called YUCA, and what you do with it is it sits on your phone as apps do, and it will allow you to scan a barcode of a cosmetic or a food and it will tell you how many toxins are in there and whether you should use it or not and what the toxins do.

And if it's not good, it will give you the alternatives that would be a better option. It's fascinating. My sister started using it the other week and she texted me and said, I've just gone through my bathroom and literally cleared out half the stuff that I thought was natural and good and everything else and just ordered a load of things. Because every time you put anything on your body, be it a shaving foam or a shampoo or a body cream or a lipstick mascara or whatever it is, putting anything on your body is the same as eating it. It will get absorbed through the skin and into your system. And most of these chemicals are known to cause endocrine disruption and that's hormonal disruption. And so messing around with your hormones and having chemicals in you every day that you're putting on because you like the scent or whatever it is, that's another really, really big area that has just got worse and worse and worse over the years.

Deodorant, for example, majority of them use aluminum because it's antiviral, antibacterial, aluminum will 1000000% cause cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, it's a very, very toxic heavy metal. If we look at the increase of aerosol deodorant in the last 50 years and compare that with the graph for Alzheimer's increase or dementia increase, not the only reason, but there's a definite correlation to how it's got worse and worse. So there's a lot of these things going on. So the YUCA app, you can definitely download a free version and you can look at the things that you're using, be it cosmetics, foods, if you're getting something in a bag and it's got a barcode, ping the barcode and it'll tell you, no, this has got this added. There's that preservative, it causes that problem. Here's a better alternative. Fascinating, but makes life a lot easier when you're trying to avoid these things.

Matt Feret:

That is fascinating. It just made my brain hurt though, because now I got to do one more thing.

Paul Burgess:

Get the right people doing it for you. You won't have to worry about it.

How Curated Treatment Plans are Created Using Functional Medicine with Paul Burgess [40:35]

Matt Feret:

Well, that's why I was going to bring it right back to you and functional medicine, which is okay, so I come to you get a free consult, it says, you know what? You're in the right mindset, you're in the right way to move forward. We want to work together. And then you send me off and get a lot of tests that are probably expensive, and then you get the tests, read them, and then what? We have a consult and if we have a consult, you give some sort of a prescription. And I don't mean drugs necessarily. And then what, is there a monitoring, do you say? I mean, you said we worked with people for months and months and years and years. This kind of seems like it's a new way of living. Instead of going to get your oil changed, you bring in your card and the mechanic once every couple of days to make sure everything's running well. It's not just when the transmission fails, it's we're going to look at that transmission.

Paul Burgess:

We want to do it before it fails because once it's failed, there's a much bigger job and that's going to be off the road for a week, and that's a really good way of putting it. So what happens is the results come back and then we go back over them and discuss what the findings are, and then we will look at the areas that need addressing. So okay, we've got some of this going on, we've got the other, et cetera, et cetera. Then we'll look at, okay, this is going to be either six months of work or a year initially, and we'll put in place what you need to do, and then we monitor you every two weeks. So we make sure that, did you receive the treatment plan? Did you see the treatment that was delivered to you? When you're taking it, are you feeling okay?

How's your sleeping? What's your stress? How's your digestion? We monitor everything very closely because I don't know how Matt Feret is going to respond to this treatment plan until he does it. I can be pretty accurate, but I don't know enough about how your particular body's going to respond. And 90% of the time, they're absolutely fine and they've got the odd one that's like, no, I'm not feeling great on this. Fine, no problem. Let's change it. So we can only do that if we monitor it very closely. Most practitioners run a model that says, let's see you and then come back in three months and in the three months I want you to do all of this. And while they're talking about it, it makes perfect sense. But when they then send you an email or a report that has all of these things you need to do on a daily basis, it's really overwhelming and that means you don't take the action because it's too much.

So there's no point because what we need, I need you to take action. So if the first thing I say is, well, okay, I just need you to take these two nutraceuticals. So nutraceuticals are natural products have the same effects as pharmaceuticals, but without the side effects. And we use some very, very specific ones that have not only efficacy in humans, but the combination in the pot has been tested in that combination. A lot of the time companies will say they've tested the individual ingredients and they all seem to have a benefit. Then they put them all into a combination, but I haven't tested that combination. And what we do is we make sure we use the ones that have been done and then so you start doing something, it's a small amount so you can put it into your lifestyle and then two week’s time, how are you getting on?

Great, okay, we just want to change this. Now. I had this conversation with somebody yesterday and we're just talking about his sleep and he was getting kind of six hours and it was just a little bit too low for what we wanted for him. So I said, look, do you think you can do fifteen minutes extra before? So in other words, go to bed fifteen minutes earlier and try to wake up fifteen minutes later, would that really mess your day up? He was on a tight schedule in the morning and stuff, and he said, no, I could do that. I said, okay, but if we think about it, so fifteen minutes, we've got half an hour a day. If we look at that over a month, it's about 14 hours. Look at that over a year, it's about 24 days extra sleep just for the extra fifteen minutes early, fifteen minutes late, which is almost an extra month in bed.

How much more energy are you going to have just by doing that small little adjustment because you've got so much more sleep over time. And so yeah, that's a great idea. I can manage that. Good. Let's just start. Let's just do that. Let's try that for this time. Keep taking this thing you're doing. Keep running the diet that you're doing and that's fine. And so we can monitor exactly what's going on with people on a very close basis. And then there's nothing overwhelming. And if they tell and go, I couldn't possibly do that, you have no problem. Let's find a different way that we can get the same results, but that you can incorporate into your lifestyle. Because over time when people feel the results, then they realize actually, I can't not do this. I'm feeling so much better going to bed at 10 o'clock, 10:30 than I do at 12 o'clock or 1:00. I feel so much better when I don't eat those things. There's no way I'm going to go back to that. But we have to let them have their own experience and eventually they'll catch up with the program if you like.

Matt Feret:

Well, I'm so glad you told that story and brought that up because before you did, I was feeling, and maybe others were as well, a sense of overwhelm, right? If I, it's almost see no evil, hear no evil. If I don't engage anyone around the functional medicine piece, then I can just keep kind of going and maybe trying to diet and lose ten pounds by starving myself and I guess try to get eight hours or whatever. But now, if I go to someone who's going to be an expert and actually help me and tell me what I feared or what I may have feared is I'm going to get a lot of homework. Not only do you have to take these supplements and these vitamins and take these tests, but now you got to go work out an hour a day in a specific way and you can't eat ice cream anymore and you can only eat and it's just this, here's your homework dump. And that I think probably turns a lot of people off to where it's not incremental, it's not ease into it, ease into it. You've lived forty, fifty, sixty years doing it your way. The gradual piece is important to note and I'm glad you did.

The Benefits of Functional Medicine with Paul Burgess [47:45]

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, and also what's the goal here is to get the patient better and to turn their life into this experience that they have, the energy and the cognitive function and the longevity, and they have this great experience every day. That's the goal. It does not work by dumping a load of homework on someone is massively overwhelming and they just throw their hands up in the air and go, well, I might as well just eat the ice cream because it is not effective. And that's how most practitioners run their model, their treatment model. It's like, okay, here's all this stuff. Go away and do that and then come back in three months. And then they're chasing after them three months later saying, well come back and because I need the payment for your consult, I need you to pay me for it. I haven't got many people that I'm dealing with and the guys don't, or the ladies don't want to go back because they haven't done the work to go, well, that didn't work for me.

And I know that for a fact because I've seen it for so long, and the only way you can do it, and I loved your analogy about the car, is that you go in on a regular basis every two weeks you go in and someone checks your tires, your oil, your transmission, your cleans, the windshield, does all the work that needs to be doing, make sure that the brakes are right. The steering's good? Yep, you're good. Oh, hang on, we found something. Let's just tweak that. Okay, off you go again. You're great and you're off, right? And it's a similar kind of thing in that I'm in your life for a year and you are able to contact me. It's not just two weeks.

I'm going to vacation next week. Can I take these things with me? What's the best way for me to stay on top of this? Is there a better way to do that? I always find it difficult to sleep. So, I’ll send you something for sleep, and I just ask that you try it. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, no harm, no foul. And then they take something with them like that, so it's really simple and they go, oh my God, it was the most crazy thing it worked. It's just about how do we optimize your life and treat you at the same time? And you can't do that by saying, here's a fifty page report that tells you these are the things you've got to do. You've got to go to the top of the mountain and meditate for a hours a day and then only drink the tears of a fairy and whatever it is, it's not usable. So the goal is to get people, well give them an life and to do that, you have to coach them. You have to be there for them all the time.

Matt Feret:

Again, there's been a lot in the last several years about supplements and the quality or lack of quality of those supplements, and there's been a big debate, at least in this country around the FDA doesn't look at it or they do look at it, but they're not buy this one, not that one. This company's got fillers, this company doesn't. Again, all exhausting. How the heck are you supposed to know all this by comparison, how functional medicine and these personalized plans is also growing in popularity. I think for a very good reason. If I'm a consumer and I'm looking to go do this, how do I know? I don't know. This is why I drew the parallel. I don't know what supplements have fillers in it and which ones don't. Unless I sit down there and do loads of research and then even then, I'm not really sure. By the same token, if I'm looking for a functional medicine specialist, how do I know that I've got a good one or an interesting one there? I mean, at least I'm not aware of a stack ranking. How do I know if I've got a good one? How do I start the search?

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, so actually one of the biggest problems is just because someone has a big following or they're well known, say in the industry, or they've been on Dr. Phil or whatever it is, doesn't have any correlation with how good they are, and you will get to know if your practitioner is the right one for you. Just by talking with them and seeing what their philosophy is and how they would like to approach things. And if it resonates with you, then you go, okay, that's fine, because that's what I need to work with. I need to work with someone who is going to resonate with me, understand what I'm trying to achieve, and do it in a way that's not overwhelming and that has the patience and has the ability to do this properly. When it comes to supplementation, everyone that works with us, the other thing that we do differently is it's an all-inclusive program.

So basically, you pay one price upfront and then everything is supplied for you. So if I think you need this IV, or you need this particular nutraceutical program, or you need this detoxification or whatever it is, all gets delivered to your door. The IV, the nurse would come to your door, but it all gets delivered to your door with all the instructions that we go over on the call so you know exactly what it is. You get a little table that shows you what to do and it makes sure that everything is supplied for you. You don't even have to worry about which ones do I need to get. The other thing is there are many nutraceutical brands that are practitioner only and there's a reason they're practitioner only because it's only practitioners that should be prescribing them.

There are some good ones that you can buy in basically like CVS and things, but there they're few and far between. The practitioner only brands that good practitioners will use are the ones like we said earlier, that have been tested in combination and in humans and have efficacy and have proof of that. And so you would use things that we know are as good quality as you can possibly get, but then the most important thing is let's monitor the response. If they're responding really well to it, then that's great. We might be able to accelerate the program doing so well better than we thought you were going to. We can push things a little bit quicker or it's like, okay, we need to take a bit more time here and we just slow things down. Taking four drops of this is causing you nausea, so let's bring it down to two and let's just do it slowly and in a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll bump it to three because everyone is still individual.

So knowing the quality of the product, that's your practitioner's job, knowing how to find a good one. I think there isn't a ranking, there isn't a governing body per se, but seeing testimonials, speaking to past patients, listening to what they have to say, and if they resonate with you, I think you'll get an understanding of how good they will be. And also it's about how much time are you going to spend with me? Because if you're going to spend an hour now and then an hour in three months, I might need more support than that and I want to be able to support the person the way through the process because the goal is to get them better and I don't know another way of doing it. I mean if there is, I'm open to it, but for me personally, it's like I keep going back to this car analogy, which I love so much, and I'm going to start using that. It's like if you are looking at that car every week or every couple of weeks and you are just keeping on top of things as things start to wear out, whatever it is, you're never going to come to a place where something breaks and then the whole thing can cost so, so much more money, which in health terms is cardiovascular event or cancer or a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or something.

Matt Feret:

Literal money and your health bank basically.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, and it is an old saying that I've been using for years and years, but we're all born with a bank account and we can't put any money in, but every day we withdraw 24 hours, and if that 24 hours is spent stressed or concerned about my health or in pain or just not absolutely thriving and enjoying life, then that 24 hours gets screwed up, thrown in the waste paper bin, and the next day you go and draw out another 24 hours. The issue is we do not know what our balance is, so I might have another two days to pull out, I don't know. Or I might have 20,000, God willing, but I don't know what it's going to be, but I know what I'm taking that 24 hours today, and so this day needs to be phenomenal for me. I need to enjoy everything and I need to be in a frame of mind that I start the day looking for the amazing things, being receptive to them. I can't start the day looking at, oh my God, there's my electricity bill now, and that's gone up and this other thing's happened, and you can't do those things. You have to get up and look at where is it going to be today? I know it's out there and I'm finding it, and that's all I'm looking for. I have several children. Eldest is 30, youngest is five. And the five-year-old and I started this couple of years ago when she kind of started understanding things. Her goal, every day she has to wake up and then look for five things that made her happy today. And they can be the most stupid things, right? Oh, I went nanny's house and I did something. I played in the garden or something. I don't care what it's, I want her proactively looking for good things in her life. I don't want to focusing on, oh, that person's got that Barbie doll and I haven't got one and this thing on tv, it's not interesting. Where can you find the great things? And at the end of the day, right, what the five things today then? And she'll reel them off, I did this, I went there, I did that. And sometimes she'll come out with 10. And that setup if you like, that perspective can only happen if you're not worrying about other things in life. Like my health, why I'm so tired, should I be using that diet? Should I be eating that thing? Whatever it is that is done when everything else is taken care of. And that's where we want to get the patient to.

Common Early Indications of Health Complications with Paul Burgess [58:31]

Matt Feret:

Well said. And I'm going to ask you one more question because you've been very generous with your time. And the question is this, if there aren't any large markers in my life, in other words, I haven't had a cardiac event, I don't have diabetes, I haven't had something that's been diagnosed, but I might be a little overweight, I might be on high blood pressure medicine, I might be on cholesterol. I get tired when I eat a certain food or don't feel good if I overeat. Besides the obvious markers of, wow, something's wrong and you might need to go get a personalized approach to your health moving forward, what are some of the smaller or quieter signs? You mentioned sleep a lot. You mentioned sleep quality. What are the quieter signs that I may not be paying attention to or I may not have my brain wrapped around that might indicate something is off an off kilter?

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, that's a really good question because everyone's very different. But some of the bigger fundamentals would be if you find yourself waking up tired, that's definitely something to think about. Why is it you've just slept and you wake up and don't feel refreshed? A lot of people are, you wake up refreshed and everyone says, well, I've never done that in my life. I've never felt like that. Well, actually you have because when you see a five-year-old get out of bed, they are hit the ground running and there's no stopping them. So it is definitely not something that you have as a child. But as we get older, some of these things start creeping in and the quality of your sleep contributes hugely to that. So if your sleep is disturbed, you can constantly get up and go to the toilet or you toss turn and you can't get back to sleep or your brain's racing.

There are signs there that there are other underlying things that need to be addressed. If you feel like your memory is not as good as it used to be and you forget people's names or you go, oh yeah, what was that film I watched yesterday? Or I can remember what happened 30 years ago, but I can't remember what I had for breakfast. Or you find yourself searching for words in a sentence and you're speaking and you know what you want to say, but you can't really get them. That's another good indicator that probably worth having a look at. Maybe what else might be going on because it's a kind of a sign of inflammation and once your brain becomes slightly inflamed, a lot of these synapses, the messages in the brain don't get across very well. And there's a little bit of retardation. It's a bit slow in its processing What's causing the inflammation?

Is it toxicity? Is it mold? Is it glucose? Is it some pathogen or a viral infection or something? Is something going on that's driving it? And very often it's a combination of things. It's never just one thing. And you get to fifty, sixty years old, and you go like you've accumulated all these things. And now what happens is we kind of start to accept them because it happens over a long period of time. We gradually become more tired, gradually forget more names. Gradually we adapt to it and go, that's just normal, isn't it? And then the doctor says, oh, it's just part of getting older.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, you get the “things change when you get older” right? I do.

Paul Burgess:

Well, what if they didn't have to change? What if there was a reason for it happening? And we could change that and make it not happen. And I can assure you the people that cholesterol, it is the biggest killer in the world. Cardiovascular disease. It's not just cholesterol, but many people, like you said, got cholesterol, statins, blood pressure meds, diabetes, metformin meds, and they're trying to balance all of these things to make them get through a day, but they're not curing anything, not fixing anything. And people on statins have a higher all cause mortality rate than people that don't take statins because increasing cholesterol, it's almost like a thermostat. And as your body becomes more inflamed or more diseased if you like or problems, your cholesterol goes up as a protective mechanism. Now if you take a statin, you artificially bring down that level and then your bloods, it says, well, look, everything's fine, cholesterol's good, the statins are working, but actually what was driving it up in the first place has not been addressed and is still going on.

So, you've still got the underlying problem. You're just now blissfully unaware of it until the event happens, whatever it is. And then you go, oh, what happened there? Yeah, not sure about that. So getting tired, waking up tired, maybe some brain fog, low libido. As you get older, that's what happens. Not really. I've got a 73-year-old client who's got testosterone levels of a 25-year-old, and it's like natural. It doesn't take any medication or testosterone replacement therapy or anything like that. And the other week when I spoke with him, he had a 11.5% body fat, 87% muscle mass according to his local trainer. And he was the best shape he's been in for the last eight years at 73.

It's like, what more can you ask for with people? And so there are lots of little signs that could just show you, just get a check done. Just go and see someone that can do things. By all means, give me a call, happily check through with you whatever the symptoms are. We've got a lot of long COVID going on with people. A lot of people that have felt really tired since COVID and never really got back on track. There's a lot of reasons for that that we know about now and that we can reverse. So there's always worth checking it out just for housekeeping. And if nothing comes up, you go great. I mean, I'm in a good place like the car, right? Nothing come up today. You're in a good place. Do another 5,000 miles. Check it again. So there are lots of things, but always err on the side of caution and do some preventative stuff first.

Concluding Nutritional Advice and Out with Matt Feret and Paul Burgess [1:05:02]

Matt Feret:

Thanks for answering that. We've covered a lot of ground, but I know there's a lot we haven't. Are there any topics around functional medicine and telehealth, telemedicine or anything those that I didn't ask for that we didn't talk about that I should have?

Paul Burgess:

Do you know what? There's a lot of good things that we discussed, but there's so much more that we could do and we could do another whole episode on it. It's crazy. The one thing, what I will say actually is if you go to my website, you can download a lot of free things like certain PDFs for various things, migraines, back pain, cholesterol, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of good information there. But a few years ago I wrote a  diet for a patient of mine because I wanted something very simple, very easy to follow, that worked really well. And it was at the height of the keto wave, if you like, and everyone was jumping on it and this guy was saying to me, look, I think this is the way forward.

I'm like, no, it's not the way forward for you. I'm telling you now that will really not be a good move for you, but let me put something together for you. And so what I'll do is I'll give you it now for free. The principle, right? It's very simple and people can start using this from today and start really seeing some value from it because it's such a simple process as most good ideas are, right? So the diet is called a three by five diet and it means three meals a day, five hours apart, and that's it. It's very simple. And here's the reason. Firstly, people tend to eat too quickly since their last meal, and they tend not to let their blood glucose stabilize enough so that their body burns fat for fuel ever. They're constantly eating and therefore they're always burning the fuel that they're eating. They're burning the carbohydrate or the glucose, whatever it is. And over time, as we get older, this mechanism we have in our cells that goes between burning fat for fuel and sugar for fuel, which should be very flexible. It's called metabolic flexibility. It should be able to flip between one and the other without any issue, and that's what gives you longevity and health. Most people are stuck in the sugar carbohydrate mode, and when they don't eat for a period of time, they get this thing called hangry. Have you heard of that?

Matt Feret:

Oh yeah.

Paul Burgess:

And then you're in the supermarket hungry and your basket of goods is very different to if you just went in and you've just eaten because your brain's like, yeah, get the pizza, pepperoni, pizzas.

Matt Feret:

Yep.

Paul Burgess:

So three meals a day, five hours apart. That gives your body enough time to digest the meal properly. And then the very simple rules are breakfast and lunch are made up of protein, good fats and vegetables, so any protein sauce, any good fat sauce, any vegetables for both breakfast and lunch, dinner, you have protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables, very simple process. So no carbohydrates, breakfast and lunch, but your good fats and your proteins and veg. And then in the evening, less of the fats, but your protein, carbohydrate and veg and what it does by putting carbohydrate in the evening, it replenishes the stores you've had none all day. So it replenishes any glucose you've used up, but it also makes you sleep better because carbohydrate will produce serotonin. Serotonin becomes melatonin. Melatonin helps you sleep, so you get a much better glucose management overnight where you sleep and in the morning when you get up, you have your protein, fats, and vegetables again, and that gives your brain function and stable energy throughout the day.

What people find when they do it is that they have far better energy through the day because they're not in a big rollercoaster of glucose spikes and troughs. They have better brain function and they have better sleep, and they lose weight as a side effect. Some people have lost 20, 30, 50, 60 pounds in three months, hardly exercising, just doing that. There's no calorie counting, right? No. What are my macros? It's just follow some simple things and it would just get people to eat when they're hungry. The other thing is, let's say your schedule was you have breakfast at eight, lunch at one, dinner at six. Let's just say it's five hours, right? You finish dinner by quarter past six, half past six, and you go to bed at half ten. You've got four hours after eating before you go to bed. That's one of the most important things when you're looking at good sleep, because if you're still trying to digest a meal, your heart rate will be elevated because the energy needed to digest a meal is about the same as a two hour workout.

So your body's working really hard to digest all this food, break it down, make it into something absorbable, absorb it, put it into all the cells. It's a lot of work. If you do that too close to bed, you'll see overnight your heart rate is elevated. You don't get the deep sleep you need, you don't get the restorative sleep, and you wake up tired. If you have stopped three, four hours prior to bed, not only will you sleep better, you get up much more energized, but you're also just inadvertently getting about 12 or 14 hours of fasting time, right? No food in the body that then allows the body to do all the great things it can do when it's not eating all the time. So it kind of uses all of the different principles of glucose metabolism and sleep and fasting and all the different things without having to think about it.

Matt Feret:

It really does. When you sat there and explained it, I was like, okay, so it's not crazy low carb, no carb, but you're paying attention to your carbohydrate slash glucose intake. You are doing a bit of meal planning so you're not snacking in the middle of it and you're eating high quality foods at times of the day where you need to be productive. And then, yeah, you're putting some fasting in there as well if you're stopping at six and not snacking between six and bedtime.

Paul Burgess:

But here's the thing, when you eat like that, you don't snack because your blood glucose isn't bouncing around the place all day. It's a very steady energy production. And your cells over time and quite quickly will go back to burning fat and carbohydrate for fuel as it needs to. So it means that you don't get these sugar cravings and you don't get these hunger pains because actually your body is satiated. And again, there's no calorie counting. So if you decide to eat this much food, an amount that is substantial, by the time you get to lunch, I will be pretty sure that you're not going to eat a big meal again, because you don't need to. If you eat the processed foods, if you eat the fast releasing junk carbohydrate sugar, then 100% you'll be hungry in an hour's time, two hours time because your blood glucose is bouncing all over the place.

But when you eat proper whole foods on a regular basis, it kind of settles everything down. There's no magic pill, no magic bullet. It's not a fancy diet. It just eat like that. And you'll see, and over time what else will happen? Your sleep will be better, your energy will be better, your immune system will be better, your cognitive function will be better. You'll bring down a lot of inflammation, and then your hormones will start working far better and you'll lose weight. So anyway, that's for everyone to have for free. Take it. If you want to buy the book, you can, but it's no big deal. It's not going to tell you anything more you don't know other than give you some examples probably. But again, at the website, you can find all that, and there's lots of other things there for free. Or you can book a call. So by all means, if people want to have a chat with me, I'll be happy. And if they just want to peruse the website, then good for them.

Matt Feret:

Paul, you've been a wonderful guest. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Paul Burgess:

Yeah, it's been great fun.

Matt Feret:

Take care.

Paul Burgess:

Thanks, man.

Matt Feret:

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